Carl Lee Tolbert runs it himself. For 30 years he has worked industrial distribution from the inside of the problem, in application engineering, product management, design, and sales, building solutions, pricing them, and standing behind them when they reached the customer. He sizes drives, writes quotes, and answers the phone when a contractor is standing at a counter on a Friday afternoon. That work includes roles such as vice president of engineering and director of marketing, an odd mix to carry with a PhD. The 10 Immutable Laws explains most of how it fits together.
These instruments exist because everything else fell short. He tried the standard channel surveys and satisfaction scores and watched them come back vague, gameable, or flattering, plenty of data and nothing anyone could act on. So he built his own, using the same discipline behind his PhD dissertation on industrial distribution: stated benchmarks, respondent protections, a written protocol, built to measure what distributors actually do rather than what they say in a survey.
The practice exists partly because of the people who kept calling on him. Sales-system sellers, each with a process to run his people through, all of it ending at the same question: where is your data? He has the data. The instruments were fielded across 3 major brands and 50 distributor and rep organizations, the predictions were registered with the Wharton Credibility Lab before any data was collected, and the result came in within a single point. The paper that reports it is under peer review.
That origin is the point. Most channel research is run by people who have never carried a product line or owned an application, so they take a distributor's answer at face value. He knows whether a complaint about application support is a real gap or cover for a competitor, because he has been the one accountable for solving it. A marketer who has never stood at a counter cannot hear the difference between a line that is losing and a line that is simply never mentioned.
He facilitates every session personally. Not an associate, not a moderator hired for the day. The person reading your results is the same person who built the instrument.
He is also faculty in doctoral programs in organizational leadership and a peer reviewer for several academic journals, which matters here for one narrow reason. The instruments on this site are built the way research instruments are built rather than assembled from questions that sounded good in a kickoff meeting. The arguments behind them are published in full under Guides, and the terms every engagement runs on are published under How we work.
Two other properties
The technical practice, covering drives, reliability, and the maintenance workforce, lives at Wayward Leaders. The academic and methodology work lives at Modus Limbi. All three are properties of Wayward Leaders LLC.
The separation is deliberate. A vice president of sales looking for channel research should not have to read past a fault code table to find it.