Turn rapid growth and complexity into sustained, world-class performance.
Most advisors stop at what to change and why. We focus on how. You don’t need another consulting firm. You need an architect.
Where we can help
Help leaders scale as fast as the organization is growing.
Align leaders and teams quickly and sustainably around what matters, shared operating principles and standards, innovation and implementation roadmaps.
Deliver excellence on tight timelines, in complex settings.
Do more with less. Amplify and accelerate innovation and delivery. Optimize talent, collaborator, and customer delight and advocacy.
Ways to work together
Four ways we help leaders and teams reach their next level.
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One-on-one work with senior leaders to help them mobilize, align, and unleash talent, creativity, and potential.
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Highly collaborative, time-limited innovation sessions that bring leaders at all levels together to architect the future.
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Designing and leading team and organization-wide leaps to new levels of performance, and staying through implementation until goals are exceeded.
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Essential and advanced programs that equip leaders and teams with our tools and practices, so performance keeps rising long after we step back.
Results clients have achieved
Each result was produced with our proprietary concepts, tools, and practices, field-tested over twenty-five years and now the Innovation Studio toolkit.
30%: An enterprise marketing team exceeded its stretch goals by 30 percent.
4×: A finance team quadrupled its output with the same headcount.
Innovation Charrettes: A corporate team designed and built a comprehensive forecasting system, shifting its focus from collecting and analyzing data to designing strategic scenarios and recommendations for executive-team review and decision making.
A leadership team reimagined and re-architected its global focus, enterprise architecture, strategy, and implementation roadmap.
6 Months: In just six months, a large metropolitan newspaper transformed its operations and those of its 20 local weekly papers, reaching its highest EBITDA in decades.
Architecture of Innovation: A global leadership team redesigned its enterprise architecture, how it communicates, sets priorities, and executes strategy.
Team Integration: Two leading engineering and innovation teams co-designed a shared culture and standards, merging into one dynamic global organization with leadership and innovation at every level.
Leadership Growth: Leaders at all levels have consistently leveraged our Full Potential Coaching to advance their careers while expanding their contribution and influence enterprise-wide.
Trusted by leaders at Apple, Amazon, IBM, Capital One, American Express, Wells Fargo, Hearst, and the U.S. Tennis Association.
About Sandy Nelson
Sandy Nelson builds the capabilities, practices, and ways of working that help leaders and teams reach their full potential and sustain it. Clients prize his ability to make the complex simple, and his relationships with them typically last years, often decades.
An architect turned advisor, Sandy spent twenty-five years as an internationally recognized architect, designing and leading complex, politically sensitive projects worth billions of dollars. When the schedule for IBM's Global Education Center was compressed from twenty-four months to thirteen, he brought every player together to map the work from day one, and the center opened on time and on budget. His award-winning urban design work includes the revitalization of six blocks at the heart of downtown Atlanta and Mizner Park in Boca Raton. Routinely invited into his clients' strategic conversations, he found his focus shifting from buildings to the leaders and teams who occupy them.
In the decades since, he has helped leaders from CEOs to frontline teams reach new levels of performance at some of the world's most admired organizations. He works the way an architect does: listening deeply, distilling complexity to its essence, designing solutions with the people who will live in them, and staying through implementation until they work.
Sandy co-founded Aperio International in 2000. He is the founder of the Renaissance 21 Innovation Studio and the author of Thrive, by Design: Welcome to the Renaissance 21 Innovation Studio.
Credentials
Certified Master Somatic Coach, Strozzi Institute
Professional coaching, New Ventures West
BArch, University of Tennessee
Associate of Arts, Oxford College of Emory University
Speaking
Talks that reveal what’s possible.
Many of today’s most successful leaders want more, and pursue it the only way they know: bearing down and grinding it out. Sandy’s talks reveal a different path. They show the gap between success and thriving: reaching and sustaining full potential while flourishing in everything that matters, for individuals, teams and organizations. They also show why closing that gap is one of the greatest untapped opportunities in business today.
The message is simple and practical: optimized human potential is optimized shareholder and stakeholder value.
From Success to Thriving. Why the most successful organizations still leave their greatest potential untapped, and how to rethink the how to reach it.
Thrive, by Design. The building blocks for organizations where people and performance flourish together, drawn from Sandy’s new book.
Human First, Performance Always. How putting people first unlocks the creativity, agency and commitment that drive lasting results.
Innovation as a Core Business Process. How the Innovation Studio turns innovation from an occasional initiative into how the work gets done.
Renaissance 21: Possibility and Opportunity Within a 21st-Century Renaissance. How leaders can strengthen the generative forces of innovation, agency and creativity amid complexity, risk and change.
Formats: Keynotes, leadership retreats, executive team sessions and workshops.
Start a conversation
What would it take for your leaders and teams to reach their next level? We welcome a conversation about where your organization is headed and how to get there.
snelson@aperiointernational.com
202.997.1152
Washington, D.C.