When Kim B. Clark set out to build a platform for the Leading Through Institute, the bar he brought with him was unlike any DeepRails had faced before. Kim spent 27 years on the faculty of Harvard Business School, ten of them as Dean, where he articulated HBS's foundational mission: "educating leaders who make a difference in the world." After Harvard he became President of Brigham Young University–Idaho for a decade, growing enrollment from 12,500 to over 25,000 students. Then, from 2015 to 2019, he served as a General Authority Seventy and Commissioner of Education for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, overseeing its entire global educational system: seminaries, institutes, K–12 schools, and multiple universities serving about a million students worldwide. He is now the NAC Distinguished Professor of Management at BYU Marriott School of Business, and has been teaching at the university level for over 54 years.
Kim founded the Leading Through Institute along with Erin Clark, Jonathan Clark, and David Moss. Erin, Kim's daughter and President of LTI, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and spent over 20 years at Monitor Deloitte (formerly Monitor Group), one of the world's most elite strategy consultancies, founded by Harvard Business School professors including Michael Porter. She joined straight from HBS in 2004, made Partner within eight years, and rose to Managing Director, advising the C-suites of global organizations on leadership and organizational design. Jonathan, Kim's son, holds a PhD from Harvard University and is Professor of Management and former department chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where his research centers on how leaders create the conditions for individuals, teams, and organizations to do their best work. David Moss, Co-Founder and Partner, brings decades of organizational effectiveness and human capital leadership to the team. Between them, the Clarks carry Harvard credentials at every level: a former dean, an MBA, and a PhD, and Kim, Erin, and Jonathan co-authored Leading Through: Activating the Soul, Heart, and Mind of Leadership, published by Harvard Business Review Press.
- NAC Distinguished Professor of Management, BYU Marriott School of Business
- Dean, Harvard Business School (1995–2005)
- Professor, Harvard Business School (27 years on faculty)
- President, Brigham Young University–Idaho (2005–2015); grew enrollment from 12,500 to 25,000+
- General Authority Seventy & Commissioner of Education, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2015–2019)
- 54+ years teaching at university level
- MBA, Harvard Business School (2004)
- Former Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting
- 20+ years at Monitor Deloitte (formerly Monitor Group), the elite strategy firm founded by HBS professors including Michael Porter
- Joined Monitor Group straight from HBS; made Partner within 8 years; rose to Managing Director
- Co-author, Leading Through (HBR Press)
- PhD, Harvard University (Health Policy & Management)
- Professor of Management, University of Texas at San Antonio (10 years on faculty)
- Former Chair, Department of Management & Interim Associate Dean, UTSA
- Previously on faculty at Penn State; research roles at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- Research focus: how leaders create the conditions for individuals, teams, and organizations to do their best collective work
- Co-author, Leading Through (HBR Press)
- MBA, Brigham Young University (HR & Organizational Behavior)
- Former Director of US Human Resources, Tower Semiconductor
- 7+ years in senior HR leadership at Tower Semiconductor & Maxim Integrated
- HR Business Partner, Bank of America
- Specializes in leadership and organizational effectiveness, talent management, and building HR systems that align with business strategy
The Foundation: Decades of Scholarship, One Framework
Leading Through
Activating the Soul, Heart, and Mind of Leadership
The intellectual bedrock of Permeos. The book argues that the dominant model of organizational life, what the authors call the "power over" paradigm is deeply embedded, nearly invisible, and often destructive. The answer is leadership that permeates every corner of every organization: not the heroic CEO, but a specific kind of work that anyone, at any level, can do. Leading Through charts exactly what that work looks like, and Permeos is the platform built to teach and measure it.
LTI's framework is not the usual leadership fare. At its core it argues that leadership is both intensely personal and deeply organizational. The personal work of leadership runs across three dimensions: Soul, the moral dimension, grounded in virtue; Heart, the relational dimension, built on empathy; and Mind, the practical dimension, expressed through ownership. The organizational work of leadership runs across three more: Architecture (trust and teaming), Information (candor), and Power (respect: power through, not over).
Leadership is always moral work.
VirtueHelping people thrive.
EmpathyA process of action, learning, and change.
OwnershipInnovation through commitment and initiative.
Trust & TeamingPreserving freedom, strengthening unity.
CandorUnlocking the potential of people and teams.
RespectThe six dimensions of the Leading Through framework: the structure Permeos teaches, personalizes, and measures, with each dimension anchored to its touchpoint.
This isn't a framework pulled together for a business book. It is backed by decades of scholarship, a rigorous academic data model, a published body of original research, and the lived experience of people who have led some of the world's most demanding institutions. A platform built on that foundation couldn't afford to feel like generic edtech. It had to match the caliber of the thinking behind it, and earn the trust of a founder who has, quite literally, spent 54 years teaching what leadership means.
The Challenge: The Hardest Judgment in Applied AI
Most leadership development is episodic (a workshop, a book, a retreat, a 360 survey), and almost none of it is truly measurable. You complete the program and hope something changed. LTI wanted the opposite: development embedded in the daily flow of work, personalized to each individual leader, and grounded in direct evidence of how that person actually thinks, decides, reflects, and treats the people around them.
That ambition runs straight into one of the hardest problems in all of applied AI. Grading a math problem is binary: right or wrong. Judging whether a human being is genuinely growing in empathy, ownership, or candor, drawn from their real reflections, written plans, and actual conversations, is subtle, contextual, and deeply personal. The signals are weak. The interpretations are contested. The stakes are high.
Get it wrong and you haven't logged a software error. You have told a person something untrue about who they are becoming. So "good enough" was never an option. Every AI surface in the platform had to be accurate, fair, consistent, safe, and explainable at research grade, every single time, with zero tolerance for hallucination or misjudgment.
This is among the most complex systems DeepRails has ever built, not because of any single feature, but because dozens of AI-powered surfaces each had to clear a research-grade bar simultaneously, and all of them had to agree with one another. Consistency across thousands of interactions. Fairness across very different people, contexts, and cultures. Faithfulness to a specific, proprietary intellectual framework. And the ability to explain every judgment, all at once. The standard wasn't set by a product manager's judgment call. It was set by a man who spent 54 years teaching at Harvard and BYU, who oversaw educational systems serving millions, and who was evaluating whether AI was worthy of carrying his life's work forward.
The Platform: Permeos
The result is Permeos, a first-of-its-kind AI-native platform that develops and measures human leadership growth. AI is not a feature added to the product — it is the medium the entire experience runs on. A personalized onboarding that learns each leader's context, role, and goals from day one. An always-available AI coach, mentor, and tutor woven into every learning interaction. AI-guided assessment and reflection tied directly to real evidence of the leader's work. And a growth model that continuously reads what a person actually does (their reflections, plans, actions) and surfaces their development across all six dimensions of the Leading Through framework.
How DeepRails Built It: Evaluation-First, Trust at Every Layer
The hard part was never adding AI. It was making every one of those surfaces genuinely trustworthy. DeepRails brought the same evaluation-first, guardrails-first discipline that defines our products: every output is checked for correctness, completeness, fairness, and safety before it reaches a learner. Every judgment the platform makes about a person's growth is evidence-based, auditable, and reproducible, never a black box.
That required solving five distinct problems simultaneously:
- AI in every surface: onboarding, tutoring, mentoring, coaching, assessment, reflection, and growth measurement, each one individually engineered to be reliable, then made to work in concert.
- Grounded in the framework, not improvised: the platform's intelligence is anchored to LTI's own research and academic model, so every judgment reflects the Leading Through philosophy rather than a generic model's approximation of it.
- Evidence over impressions: signals of growth are derived from a leader's actual work, not self-report, and held to explicit, consistent standards so a result means the same thing for every person, every time.
- Auditable by design: every AI interaction is logged and reviewable, giving LTI complete transparency and editorial control over how the platform reasons about a person's development.
- Private and fully owned: the entire platform is architected and deployed inside LTI's own cloud environment, under LTI's ownership, so learner data never leaves their control.
Every learner interaction is protected by DeepRails
Permeos doesn't just use AI carefully; it carries DeepRails' Hallucination Safe™ certification. Every AI response the platform generates is continuously validated against the Leading Through Institute's own source material before it ever reaches a learner, guarding against hallucinations, fabrications, and misattributions on every single interaction. It is the reason a platform entrusted with something as consequential as a person's growth as a leader can be trusted with it at all.
What Makes Permeos Different: An Industry Measuring the Wrong Thing
Before designing Permeos, the team conducted a deep study of the competitive landscape: a hands-on review of 19 of the most credible leadership-development platforms in the world, spanning coaching marketplaces, content libraries, assessment specialists, and the newest AI-native tools. The field is full of capable products. But they cluster into four archetypes (platform giants, coaching-first, framework-driven, and assessment specialists), and almost none do more than one of them well.
The more important finding was what none of them did. Every platform stops at the same ceiling: engagement, course completion, behavior-change nudges, or a periodic 360 assessment. Not one could answer the only question that ultimately matters in leadership development: is this person actually becoming a better leader? That is precisely the gap Permeos was built to close.
Based on a hands-on study of 19 leading leadership-development platforms, spanning coaching marketplaces, content libraries, assessment specialists, and AI-native tools. None measured genuine development; every one stopped at behavior change or a periodic assessment.
A capable AI coach, it turned out, is now table stakes; the strongest competitors all have one. So Permeos was built to win on what none of them can: it measures genuine, durable growth across the six human dimensions of the Leading Through framework, and it does so with AI that is transparent, auditable, and under the user's control rather than a black box.
The result consolidates the best of a fragmented industry: the personalization depth of the strongest AI tools, the intellectual rigor of the best framework-driven platforms, and the measurement discipline of the top assessment houses. Then it adds the one capability none of them have built.
| Capability | Permeos LTI | Coaching-first BetterUp · CoachHub · Torch | Content & framework FranklinCovey · Blanchard | Assessment DDI · Gallup · CCL | AI-native Valence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Measures genuine development (“becoming”), not just activity | – | – | – | – | |
| Grounded in a rigorous, proprietary leadership framework | – | ||||
| AI coach with persistent memory and context | – | – | |||
| Transparent, auditable, user-controlled AI | – | – | |||
| Personalized in the flow of work | – | – | |||
| Continuous, not episodic | – | ||||
| Growth measured, not self-reported | – | – | – |
The Outcome: Leadership Development, Finally Measurable
Permeos doesn't just improve on what existing leadership platforms do; it does something they fundamentally cannot. Where the rest of the industry measures activity, Permeos measures growth. Where others are episodic, Permeos is continuous. Where others are generic, Permeos is anchored to a specific, serious framework authored by the people who built the platform.
- From episodic to continuous: development is embedded in the daily flow of work, not confined to a one-off program or an annual survey.
- From opaque to measurable: leaders see their growth across all six dimensions of the Leading Through framework, backed by evidence from their actual work, not self-report.
- From generic to grounded: every AI interaction reflects a specific, research-based intellectual framework, not approximations from a general-purpose model.
- From personal to scalable: LTI owns a platform that can extend the same depth of experience from a single leader to an entire organization, without losing what makes it human.
- Trusted at the highest level: the platform carries the trust of a faculty member who has taught at the university level for over 54 years, a former Managing Director who spent 20+ years at Monitor Deloitte (one of the world's most prestigious strategy consultancies), and an academic researcher whose entire career has been devoted to exactly this question.
Why DeepRails
The Leading Through Institute could have brought this work to any engineering team. The reason they brought it to DeepRails is the same reason Permeos could be built at all: we are the only AI company whose core product is accuracy itself. Not a feature, not a mode. The whole thing. When the judgment an AI makes is about a person's character as a leader, there is no acceptable failure rate. That is exactly what DeepRails was built for.
- Evaluation-first by default: we don't ship AI we can't verify. Reliability is the starting point, not an afterthought.
- Built for the highest-stakes judgments: our guardrails and evaluation architecture are designed precisely for cases where being wrong is unacceptable.
- A true domain partnership: we built Permeos alongside LTI's scholars, encoding the Leading Through framework faithfully rather than approximately, so the platform reflects what the founders actually believe, not what a model infers they might mean.
- Production-grade and client-owned: enterprise deployment, full auditability, and complete ownership by LTI from day one.
Most companies add AI to a product. For the Leading Through Institute, DeepRails built a product where AI is the medium itself, and proved that even the most human judgment imaginable can be made accurate, fair, and trustworthy at scale.