Who we are

Charles Thames is a boutique advisory firm established in 2014. We work directly with CEOs and top teams to formulate a 'strategy for execution' and develop 'simple rules' to translate that strategy into results.

Dr. Don Sull is a global expert on executing strategy in volatile markets. He is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and was formerly a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and the London Business School. He earned his bachelors, masters, and doctorate at Harvard University. Prior to academia, Don worked as a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company, and a management-investor with the leveraged buyout firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. The Economist named him “a rising star in a new generation of management gurus,” and identified his theory of active inertia as an idea that shaped business management over the past century. Fortune listed him among the ten new management gurus. His next book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, is co-authored with Kathleen Eisenhardt, a professor at Stanford’s school of engineering, and will be published in April 2015.

Stefano Turconi is a Sloan Fellow, Lecturer, and Researcher in the Department of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at London Business School. He serves as an instructor in Executing Strategy for Results—an advanced strategy program for senior executives—and in the Action Learning Programme—a joint initiative of MIT and the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO). During the past five years, Stefano has worked closely with a multitude of CEOs and teams of executives to develop and execute strategy; he has led company-wide interventions to remove strategic bottlenecks through Simple Rules—all with documented results and far-reaching impact. Stefano holds an MSc in General Management (with distinction) from London Business School and an MSc in Industrial Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, and studied participant-centered learning methods at Harvard Business School. He has published a number of papers, case studies, and articles, including two Business Strategy Review articles.

Charlie Sull has been closely involved with the development and implementation of simple rules as a tool to execute strategy. He worked as a research assistant with Don Sull and Stanford professor Kathy Eisenhardt on the book Simple Rules: How To Thrive in a Complex World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). He has worked closely with top management teams in a variety of industries to articulate clear strategies for profitable growth, and implement simple rules to ensure the strategy is translated into day-to-day action. He is the coauthor of a number of forthcoming articles and case studies related to strategy, execution, and simple rules. Charlie earned his Bachelors degree at Harvard College, where he was the president of the Harvard Lampoon.