About Staffan Canback
Dr. Staffan Canback is the Executive Chairman of Tellusant, Inc. and a co-founder of the company.
Throughout my career, I have developed and refined an unusually broad and deep analytical capability. It enables me to see connections, develop frameworks, and solve problems that often elude conventional approaches.
Today, I reserve that capability for leaders who are intellectually curious, willing to challenge accepted wisdom, and committed to making better decisions through rigorous reasoning and evidence.
Over four decades, I have worked as a management consultant and business leader around the world. My career started with McKinsey & Company in Scandinavia where I was a partner. I then joined Monitor Company in Boston, continuing my management consulting career as a partner.
In 2004, I decided to form a new type of consulting firm, Canback Consulting, which was more deeply focused on the quantitative aspects of strategy development. In 2015 I sold the firm to The Economist Group and stayed on as managing director.
In 2020, I co-founded Tellusant together with Philip Burgin-Young, to take the next step: To move from pure advice to building repeatable, automated products that capture much of what companies and management consultants do manually within strategic planning and other corporate higher order cognitive processes. The approach is to leverage AI for strategy purposes.
I have worked on the ground in more than eighty countries ranging from Mongolia, to Eritrea, to Nicaragua, to the OECD countries. I am enthusiastic about opportunities in emerging countries. Over the years, I have lived in Sweden, the United States, India, Mexico, Denmark, and the United Kingdom.
I love quantitative analysis and will perform statistical analyses on flights instead of watching movies. “The world can be expressed in equations. The rest is fluff.”
I also enjoy building businesses. From founding McKinsey Gothenburg and Monitor Scandinavia, to establishing and leading Canback Consulting, to co-founding Tellusant.
Privately, I am a family man, married to Charlotte, and with three adult children. I enjos travel, music & the arts, and intellectual pursuits.
I earned a Civ.Ing. and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where I graduated at the top of my class; a Master in Business Administration from Harvard Business School; and a Doctor of Business Administration from Henley Business School.
I am a Fulbright Scholar; a Wallenberg Scholar; and the first prize winner of the best European doctoral dissertation in management awarded in 2003 awarded by the European Doctoral Programmes Association in Management & Business Administration (EDAMBA).
I have more than 750 academic, business, and media citations to my name.
My last name is Canbäck in Swedish.