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About

The experience
behind the work.

We founded Strategic Capabilities Group on a straightforward observation: most mid-market companies don't have a strategy problem. They have an organization problem.

Strategy is relatively easy to define. The harder question — the one that determines whether a business actually performs — is whether the organization is built to execute it. Whether the leadership team functions as a unit. Whether the operating model matches the strategy in front of it. Whether workflows and processes are aligned to the structure, or running against it.

That gap between strategy and organizational performance is where we work.

Karl Johnson

Founder & Managing Director
Karl Johnson, Founder and Managing Director, Strategic Capabilities Group

Karl spent 25 years inside some of the world's most complex organizations before founding Strategic Capabilities Group — not as a consultant observing from the outside, but as a senior leader accountable for results.

At Cargill, he led an internal consulting practice responsible for 30 to 40 global transformation programs annually — across operating model redesign, organizational design, M&A integration, market entry, and cost restructuring. He built and deployed an end-to-end M&A integration methodology covering leadership assessment, organizational design, cultural compatibility, and change management from due diligence through 120 days post-close.

At Mars, he built a Center of Excellence from the ground up — recruiting consultants from Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte — and delivered 20 to 30 transformation programs annually across Mars' global business units.

Earlier in his career, Karl established and led consulting practices within two top-ranked business schools, advising C-suite leaders at Fortune 500 companies alongside world-class faculty, and managing engagements across marketing, finance, IT, and operations. Notable engagements included operating model transformation at Pixar following their acquisition by Disney, global executive development programs for Ericsson and British Telecom, and organizational change work recognized as the second most impactful initiative across the entire US Department of Defense.

Across 25 years and more than 70 organizations, the pattern Karl has seen most consistently is the one Strategic Capabilities Group was built to solve: organizations asked to execute strategies they were never designed to deliver.

Karl is an active member of Executive Strategic Alliance, a community of current and future board members, where he provides strategic advisory guidance to high-growth technology companies.

25 Years of experience
70+ Organizations
150+ Transformation initiatives
Our Team

Every engagement is staffed deliberately.

Rather than maintaining a fixed roster of generalist consultants, Strategic Capabilities Group assembles engagement teams from a network of experienced specialists — practitioners with deep expertise in the specific disciplines each client situation requires.

Depending on the scope and nature of the engagement, that network draws on specialists in organizational design, operating model redesign, change management, leadership assessment and coaching, process improvement, and M&A integration.

This model has two advantages for clients. First, you get the specific expertise your situation requires — not the available capacity of a permanent bench. Second, every specialist we bring to an engagement has been vetted through prior work and meets the same standard of rigor and senior-level credibility that defines how Karl operates.

Fit and trust matter. Before any specialist joins a client engagement, we ensure the match is right — in expertise, in style, and in the ability to work effectively with your leadership team.

Why Mid-Market

Where it is needed most
and available least.

Large enterprises have entire functions dedicated to organizational effectiveness. They have the infrastructure, the internal expertise, and the resources to diagnose and address these challenges.

Mid-market companies — typically in the $50M to $500M revenue range — rarely do. They're complex enough for organizational design to matter enormously, but lean enough that no one owns it explicitly. The CEO feels the friction but is often too close to it to diagnose the source accurately.

We bring the organizational rigor and transformation methodology of large global enterprises into the mid-market — where it is needed most and available least.

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