The Foundation

Leadership

We help you engage, produce, and support leadership at every level.

Story

We help you answer the questions, what matters to you? And what mood fits your organization?

COLLABORATIVE ARCHITECTURE

We help you focus on establishing and building seamless collaboration that is nimble and evolves organically in real-time. 

INNOVATION

We help you identify and develop the consistent design processes in your organization that recurrently and reliably generate industry-defining innovation.

TALENT PERFORMANCE & OPTIMIZATION

Business performance is human performance and when we help generate creative engagement and opportunities for contribution, there is no limit to what your leaders and team can accomplish.

EXPERIENCE CULTURE

We work with you to imagine, design, and deliver experiences that surprise, delight, and inspire eager anticipation. These experiences turn internal and external customers into passionate advocates.

Teaming for Collaboration

Sandy Nelson

In 2000, Sandy Nelson co-founded Aperio International, and he continues to lead the organization today. Sandy is passionately pragmatic about helping leaders and teams imagine, design and deliver experiences that delight, inspire and evoke eager anticipation. 

Sandy is continuously engaged in helping leaders successfully navigate at the leading-edge. Either through coaching, building essential capabilities, or designing and leading developmental or transformational cultural architecture initiatives, he helps leaders become transformational architects of the present and future. 

Sandy’s passion is helping all-in leaders thrive—flourish in all key dimensions of what matters personally, professionally and organizationally. The desire to thrive is innate in human nature. He wants the leaders and teams he helps to experience life and work in a healthy, vigorous, fulfilling, spiritually uplifting way that exceeds their highest aspirations, cultivates, nurtures and maintains their dignity, unleashes their creativity and deepens their sense of success and impact.

Sandy’s clients are MBA’s, PhD’s in physics, computer scientists, software, hardware and environmental design. They are enterprise leaders, engineers, CPA’s, lawyers, financiers, editors, publishers, MD’s, professional and amateur athletes, data scientists, former career military officers, product and retail program managers, etc.

Working closely with business leaders and teams in a wide range of industries, Sandy is proud of eighteen continuous years of contribution to the success of leaders and teams at Apple. In addition to Apple, clients have included Audible, Amazon Publishing, United States Tennis Association, Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, United Methodist Women, American Express, Columbia House, Freedom Communications, Hearst Corporation, IBM, Kennedy/Jenks, The Orange County Register, Wells Fargo Bank and more.

During his first career as an internationally recognized architect, Sandy spent years leading diverse, multi-cultural, cross-functional teams to world-class performance while scaling, with his partners, a local commercial architectural practice to national prominence. Over time, his interest shifted from buildings to the people and organizations that occupied them, leading him to shift his focus to developing his Innovation Studio Cultural Architecture that leaders adapt for optimal situational appropriateness to cultivate and sustain leadership, innovation and seamless collaboration at every level of their organization. 

Sandy lives in Washington, DC with his partner and daughter, Linda and Gabby, and their beloved Chocolate Lab, Bailey and philosopher cat, Jackson. A lifelong athlete, artist, and voracious explorer of human creativity and culture, he is currently finishing a book, Thrive by Design, Welcome to the Renaissance 21 Innovation Studio. 


Caroline Wang

Caroline is an integral coach and consultant with over 24 years of experience in human development at the individual, team and organization level. She believes that who we are capable of becoming is beyond our wildest imagination.

Caroline’s work has touched hundreds of leaders. Seeing them step into their power brings great joy and meaning to her work. Tapping into people’s hidden potential, Caroline designs holistic coaching processes that enable leaders to discover aliveness in their work so that they can love, laugh, learn and shine.

With her extensive corporate HR experience, including fifteen years as a respected People Business Partner at Apple, she sees that the corporate people management model is at a historical point of change. The workplace is evolving into a growth space vs. a performance arena. When people thrive, businesses thrive.

Caroline’s collaboration with Sandy is focused on transforming people and the workplace to form healthy ecosystems that support human development and business growth in unprecedented ways.

Caroline had many successes with leaders and organizations in the following areas:

  • Navigating complex, fast-growing environments to influence without having positional authority
  • Unleashing leaders to grow to their career ambition vertically and/or horizontally
  • Facilitating leadership team off-sites to clarify business priorities and human capacity building
  • Reviving dynamic inner- and cross-functional team trust and collaboration
  • Redesigning organization cultures to develop, unleash and sustain leadership at all levels
  • Building cultures where innovation flows seamlessly from all levels

Caroline now lives in San Jose, California with her husband Tony and their 13-year old son Byron. They moved from Shanghai China in 2011 and are now settled in this new way of life. They enjoy hiking, golfing, and skiing together in nature.

Over the years, Caroline has built meditation, yoga, and jogging into her regular self-care practices. During Covid, she has discovered her passion and talent for cooking, always remembering to infuse gratitude and love into the food.

Caroline’s latest adventure is gardening—learning how to grow plants with the help of time. She is an avid reader sine childhood and dreams of becoming a storyteller with her own books in the future.