Before founding Strategic Capabilities Group, Karl built a 25-year career divided between internal corporate leadership and external advisory roles. This background combines 10 years as an internal corporate operator directly accountable for execution within major enterprises with 15 years as a senior external advisor guiding C-suite led transformations.
At Mars and Cargill, he partnered with C-suite, business unit, and function executives as head of internal consulting practices. In both roles, he was responsible for a portfolio of transformation programs that enabled high stakes strategic initiatives – new market entry, global scaling, innovation, product development, portfolio diversification, customer intimacy, M&A, cost restructuring, and EBITDA optimization. At Mars, these included redesigning operating models, organizational structures, and workflows to launch a new retail strategy for a $1B brand, accelerate digital product development times, systemize and improve business unit's financial forecasting acumen, and prepare plant floor operation for AI integration. At Cargill, he led similar high impact initiatives and also developed and deployed an end-to-end M&A methodology covering due diligence assessment of leadership, structural, and cultural compatibility and risks as well as integration planning and execution through first 100 days.
Earlier in his career, Karl led transformation programs for a global consulting practice and established and led consulting practices within two top-ranked business schools. He has led strategy development sessions with C-suite leaders at Fortune 500 companies alongside world renown faculty, facilitated board development programs for Land O'Lakes and CHS, and improved leadership effectiveness for Polaris. Other notable engagements included operating model transformation at Pixar following their acquisition by Disney, unified corporate culture build during the merger of Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros. Bagels, design of a new HR organization for a divestiture of Baxter Health, and organizational change work for a 1,300 person division of the U.S. Navy recognized as the second most impactful initiative of that year across the entire US Department of Defense.
Karl is currently an active member of Executive Strategic Alliance, a community of current and future board members, where he provides advisory guidance to AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) start-ups.
Across 25 years, Karl has worked with the leaders of over 70 organizations to align and strengthen the organizational capabilities required to execute their strategy.
