Alan Richter, PresidentQED Consulting takes the lead here. Its role is to help boards and executive teams navigate this complexity in a systematic, evidence-based, and human-centered way. With 37 years of experience across more than 100 countries, QED partners with boards, executives and global institutions to help them lead ethically, perform sustainably and build inclusive cultures.
The company serves a cross-industry clientele, including the Big Four. Its work extends beyond the private sector to universities, governments, and international agencies. Today, the UN system is among its largest client groups. Across this diverse landscape, QED adheres to a consistent approach.
“We don’t start with solutions, we start with understanding,” says Alan Richter, president. “With strategic assessment, we study where an organization stands, how its systems are functioning and what needs to change to support long-term performance.”
Assessment: The Foundation
Organizations often arrive with broad concerns, like ethical risk, leadership capability, declining trust, or uneven inclusion, but lack an evidence-based picture of what is driving those challenges.
QED addresses this through its proprietary Global Ethics and Integrity Benchmarks, a comprehensive organizational assessment that examines how ethics and integrity are embedded across systems, policies, leadership behaviors, and decision-making structures. The benchmarks provide a clear baseline, allowing organizations to see where they stand relative to global best practices and where risks or gaps may be emerging. The same assessment-first approach is applied to inclusion. QED has co-authored the Global DEI Benchmarks to enable organizations to systematically assess diversity, equity, and inclusion as integrated drivers of trust, engagement, and performance.
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We don’t start with solutions, we start with understanding. With strategic assessment, we study where an organization stands, how its systems are functioning and what needs to change to support long-term performance.
From Benchmarking to Strategy and Development
Once an organization has established its baseline, QED works with leadership teams to translate insight into action. At the organizational level, this involves refining governance structures, updating codes of conduct, or building long-term ethics and DEI strategies grounded in data rather than aspiration.
On an individual basis, QED supports leaders through five self-assessment tools focused on global leadership, global diversity, culture, conflict resolution and coaching. These tools help leaders to evaluate their own effectiveness and receive tailored guidance based on their results.
QED also integrates external third-party assessments as needed, ensuring that each engagement reflects the client’s context rather than a standard methodology.
The proof is in the practice. It’s seen in QED’s long-standing partnership with NASA, strengthening their leadership capabilities among its project managers through internal ethics and leadership workshops. Initially, the leadership and ethics workshops were designed exclusively for NASA managers. Over time, however, the program expanded to include international partners such as the European, Japanese, Brazilian, and Canadian space agencies. To support that shift, QED adapted its ethics curriculum to a global context, while recognizing the shared ethical values that transcend national boundaries.
The result was not just broader participation, but a more sophisticated learning environment, one that reflected the realities of global collaboration and complex decision-making.
Excellence like that has been recognized in the past through prestigious awards such as the Human Resource Executive Prize for Best New Product for the Diversity Game and the Better Business Bureau’s Ethics in Action Award. More recently, the firm has been listed among leading global consultancies by The Economist.
But recognition has never been the objective.
What matters to QED is whether leaders walk away better equipped to make decisions under pressure, across cultures, and over the long term.
Today, QED continues to invest in new product development, including an ethical leadership assessment tool and the digitization of both its Global Ethics and Integrity Benchmarks and Global DEI Benchmarks, reflecting the growing importance of data-driven insight in leadership development.
While QED’s tools continue to evolve, QED’s role remains consistent: helping leaders build the ethical, inclusive, and strategic capability required to perform sustainably.
