Press Kit

A privately held Delaware Corporation headquartered in San Clemente, California (founded in December 2023), Leader Legion, Inc.™ is a leadership-focused, technology startup with a vision to demystify and digitally support leadership. Company leadership includes Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Edward E. Tyson, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Robert L. Heaton, Chief Technology Officer Anthony Mack, and Chief Administrative Officer Jennifer E. Laratonda.

Just the Facts

• CEO Negative Impressions of Leaders

  • Beer, M., & Eisenstat, R. A. (2000). The silent killers of strategy implementation and learning. Sloan Management Review.
    ➝ CEOs point to weak leadership alignment and inability to execute as persistent frustrations.

  • Keller, S., & Meaney, M. (2017). Attracting and retaining the right talent. McKinsey & Company.
    ➝ CEOs complain of senior leaders working in silos and failing to collaborate across functions.

• Leader Negative Impressions of Leaders

  • Development Dimensions International, Inc. (2023). 2023 Global Leadership Forecast. DDI.
    ➝ Leaders’ “Confidence in Leadership Takes a Nosedive” with only 40% reporting their company has high-quality leaders.

  • Development Dimensions International, Inc. (2023). 2023 Global Leadership Forecast. DDI.
    ➝ “Only 46% of leaders say they trust their supervisor…”

• Employee Negative Impressions of Leaders

  • Edelman, R. (2022). Trust Barometer 2022: The Cycle of Distrust. Edelman.
    ➝ Global data shows widespread employee distrust in leadership, especially around transparency.

  • Pech, R., & Slade, B. (2006). Employee disengagement: Is there evidence of a growing problem? Handbook of Business Strategy.
    ➝ Found growing evidence of employee disengagement linked to declining trust and worsening views of leaders.

• Desire to Become a Leader Is Dropping

  • Pontefract, D. (2024). Conscious Unbossing: Why Gen Z is Steering Clear of Middel Management. Forbes.
    ➝ UK-wide research reveals more than half of Generation Z professionals are “…intentionally avoiding management positions.”

• • Wong, R. (2023). Young Workers Don’t Want to Become Managers — and This Study Uncovers the Reason Why. Entrepreneur.
    ➝ Visier survey of 1,000 (U.S.-based) non-managers shows under 40% of employees are interested in leading.

Leader Legion Analysis

• From the boardroom to the breakroom, no one thinks leaders are leading.

• Millennials and Generation Z don’t even want the job.

• Leadership development dollars have been steadily increasing as the problem deepens.

• Leadership tools are focused on coaching and education not execution.

The Paradigm Problem

Leadership is a mix of knowing what to do and influencing people to do it (i.e., getting them to follow). Since “knowing what to do” is variable by situation, this model has resulted in a narrow view that the study of interpersonal skills and the deployment of flexible styles will lead to better leadership.

What We Think

Leadership is not an isolated act performed once and never repeated. It is a series of actions and subroutines bound by a collective purpose.

Leadership, therefore, is a process — a process of social organization meant to create the capacity to do together what could never be done alone.

Like any process, its improvement is best sought through continuous cycles of action, analysis, and adaptation rather than academics.

Despite these simple truths, we neither speak about it as a process nor support as such.

What We Know

The SOPsApp™ is a socially enabled, mobile-forward application leveraging agentive AI and workflow automation to support the discovery, documentation, automation, management, and sharing of editable leadership routines known as LeadershipSOPs®. While the app’s creation and purpose rests heavily in the methodology and framework of the LeadershipSOPs, SOPsApp users require no familiarity with this model or any other branded leadership framework. In fact, subscribers (leaders and practitioners alike) are encouraged to share their own models and best practices via the application’s Library and social Feed.

The application is currently in Limited Release and expects to move into general availability in the fourth quarter of 2025. The MVP has been designed as a business-to-consumer, leader-forward product (to provide direct, immediate, and personal relief to a community in need) however Leader Legion’s development roadmap prioritizes professional coaching and enterprise use cases which would support business-to-business subscriptions and commerce as well.

Core features include:

• M(ai) Team™ - Team of AI assistants (executive coach, chief of staff, and app help assistant). When fully enabled, M(ai) Coach will help users find, define, and improve their Playbooks while M(ai) Chief of Staff will turbocharge execution and coordination.

• SOPs Library - repository of best-practive expert and user submitted LeadershipSOPs® which all subscribers can adopt from or publish to.

• SOPs Playbook - personal space for each user to save, review, and edit their authored and adopted SOPs.

• Gameplan - Auto-generated To Do List of Leadership Actions by team (users can create as many teams or “Communities of Effort” as they would like).

• Leaderboard - Dashboard containing Playbook, minutes of leading, and DigitalMentoring™ statistics (DigitalMentoring is a term used within the app to describe the connection made when a leader adopts an SOP from another user).

• Feed - a social networking area designed to allow subscribers to promote leadership-focused ideas and practices.

LeadershipSOPs® as a leadership model is a branded leadership methodology and framework with more than $10M in attributable sales.

Your LeadershipSOPs are defined as your standard operating procedures for structuring, operating, and perfecting your communities of effort. The “SOPs” acronym operates as a mnemonic double entendre, standing for both a methodology for leading (i.e., translating your leadership intent, competencies, and skills into replicable standard operating procedures) and a framework defining the three domains your SOPs should be focused on, namely structuring, operating, and perfecting communities of effort. These three domains of leading are further defined by the model through 16 dimensions which include the globally adopted S.C.O.P.E.® concept which replaces Mission / Vision / Value with a more comprehensive framework for determining and articulating the architectural underpinnings of a human system (Strategy, Culture, Objectives, Purpose, and Ecosystem).

The LeadershipSOPs® methodology and framework were developed prior to the formation of Leader Legion by Leader Legion Co-founder and CEO Edward E. Tyson. The LeadershipSOPs® and S.C.O.P.E.® trademarks and related intellectual property are owned by PerSynergy Consulting, LLC.

Edward E. Tyson, M.Ed. (Temple University - Adult Organizational Development) is an American entrepreneur, author, speaker, coach, and consultant known for his pragmatic and process-focused, leadership methodology and framework (LeadershipSOPs®). The model made its commercial debut approximately 10 year ago before being featured in Tyson’s book five years ago: From Expert to Executive: Mastering the SOPs of Leading (PerSynergy 2020).

Tyson is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. He spent fifteen years in various leadership roles at not-for-profit, private, and publicly traded health care organizations, culminating in executive roles in process improvement and strategy.

Following the successful sale of Sun Healthcare Group to Genesis HealthCare in 2012, Tyson pursued the development of a boutique management consulting firm, PerSynergy Consulting, which he used as a platform to research, develop, publish, practice, and license his methodology and framework (driving $10M+ in attributable sales since 2019).

“Rob and I started Leader Legion because not enough leaders are leading,” said Tyson. “We saw two very big problems: leaders aren’t clear on what the real work of leading is (aside from the skills and style we leverage to do it better); and worse, they have almost no digital tools to help them discover, define, refine, and do it.”

Robert L. Heaton is an American entrepreneur and consultant. He is a global digital and process improvement expert who, in addition to being a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) is a certified Prosci® Change Management Practioner and a licensed salesperson with the California DRE.

For more than 20 years, he has been exercising his skills within not-for-profit, private, and publicly traded organizations ranging in size and complexity from dozens of employees to 100,000. Heaton graduated from California State University Fullerton with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. He resides in Chandler, Arizona with his wife and three kids.

“I am a process improvement expert, so I come at this without a lot of leadership baggage,” said Heaton. “It seems pretty simple to me — you have a process, called leading, which is not well defined, digitally supported, or measured,” continued Heaton. “Are we really surprised performance and satisfaction are low and the lack of data is confounding the search for a solution?”

Anthony Mack is an American software engineer and former Googler known for his passion for generative AI. Before joining Google in September of 2010, Mack enjoyed a nearly 20-year career at Unitech Research, Inc. Mack quietly emerged from five years of retirement in 2024 to provide technical leadership to the Leader Legion executive team. He divides his time between his cabin in Santiago Canyon and his family cottage in Laguna Beach, California.

“Leadership (and with it scalable human enterprise), is under attack from all sides at precisely the same moment in history when we are best positioned to support it… and yet, amazingly, so few people have stepped in to help leaders lead,” said Mack. “Everyone seems to want to train leaders, but no one wants to build tools that help them get the job done — I came out of retirement to leverage agentive AI to change that.”

Jennifer E. Laratonda, J.D. (Pennsylvania State University), is an American attorney, entrepreneur, lecturer (Chapman University - Fowler School of Law), business consultant, and executive coach as well as a wellness expert with certifications as an Integrative Health Coach and Yoga instructor. Laratonda’s legal career has been split between private practice, in-house counsel roles, and management consulting.

As chief administrative officer of Leader Legion, Laratonda yokes together the company’s legal, compliance, and human resources functions, ensuring a strategic and integrated approach to these critical functions.

“Early in my career, any leadership success I had was more an accident of my personality than the result of a strategic system of action,” said Laratonda. “The SOPsApp™ gives leaders a cutting-edge tool to organize and operationalize their system of leading.”