Cook Ross was founded in September 1989 by Howard Ross, a former educator and hospital administrator who had been an organizational development consultant for four years, and Dottie Cook, a former corporate trainer, consultant, and executive.  It was renamed from the Catalyst Corporation after incorporating in 1988 due to a duplicative name. 

From the beginning the company was committed to providing services to clients that met or exceeded expectations, and which encouraged clients to look, think, and act in ways that would contribute to their success.

Although providing excellent training has always been a company strength, we realized from the start that training was but a small part of the puzzle – that good training will only be effective if it is supported by changes in the systems and structures that make up the culture of the corporation and which support new learned behaviors. We committed to systems change from the very beginning.

Dottie left the company in 1991 to marry and move to Texas, and Cook Ross continued to grow, as did our products and services. To our initial work in Diversity, Leadership, and Teambuilding, we added a capability to provide training and consulting on issues of Customer Service, Strategic Planning, and an ability to accurately assess organizational cultures through employee and customer surveys and focus groups. More recently we have developed programs to support people in their own personal and professional transformation. We also moved into product development, creating videos, CD-Rom trainings, and web based education for our clients.

As we have grown so has our client list. Over the years, household names in virtually every business category have turned to Cook Ross to make their organizations more productive. We developed the ability not only to cross industries, but to take the best practices from one to enhance the performance of others. Our work has spread around the country and around the globe. We have worked in 45 of the 50 United States, and in Canada, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. We promise to continue to grow, to learn, to develop, and to contribute the bounty of that exploration with our clients.