Dr Staffan Canback

Executive Chairman

Staffan Canback Tellusant

Staffan Canback is the Executive Chairman of Tellusant and a co-founder of the company.

Throughout his career, he has developed and refined an unusually broad and deep analytical capability. It enables him to see connections, develop frameworks, and solve problems that often elude conventional approaches.

Today, Staffan reserves that capability for leaders who are intellectually curious, willing to challenge accepted wisdom, and committed to making better decisions through rigorous reasoning and evidence.

Career

Over four decades, Staffan has worked as a management consultant and business leader around the world. His career started with McKinsey & Company Nordics where he was a partner. He then joined Monitor Company in Boston, continuing his management consulting career as a partner.

In 2004, he 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 he sold the firm to The Economist Group and stayed on as managing director till 2020.

In 2020, Staffan 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.

He has worked on the ground in more than eighty countries ranging from Mongolia, to Eritrea, to Nicaragua, to the OECD countries. He is enthusiastic about opportunities in emerging countries.

Staffan loves quantitative analysis and will perform statistical analyses on flights instead of watching movies. “The world can be expressed in equations. The rest is fluff.”

AI is a particular focus and he does not only use AI agents, but is also on top of their mathematical foundations. He focuses on the combination of linear algebra and differential equations to reduce and simplify unrestricted dimensionality overload in companies.

He also enjoys building businesses. From founding McKinsey Gothenburg and Monitor Scandinavia, to establishing and leading Canback Consulting, to co-founding Tellusant.

Academics

Staffan Canback earned a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where he graduated at the top of his class; a Master in Business Administration from Harvard Business School; and a Doctor of Business Administration from Henley Business School.

Further, he is a Fulbright Scholar; a Wallenberg Scholar; and the first prize winner of best European doctoral dissertation in management awarded by the European Doctoral Programmes Association in Management & Business Administration — EDAMBA — in 2003.

Visit his personal website at CANBACK think.
See his academic publications on Figshare.

Personal

Privately, Staffan is family-oriented person, married to Charlotte, and with three adult children. He enjoys travel, music & the arts, and intellectual pursuits.

Significant Clients Before Tellusant

This list shows the depth and breadth of our experiences. This is mainly at the CEO level.

• ABB
• AB InBev
• AT&T
• Colgate-Palmolive
• Diageo
• Distell
• Efes
• Electrolux
• Ericsson
• Essity
• FEMSA
• Fiskars
• Gloria
• Hasselblad
• HSBC
• Imperial Brands
• Kraft Heinz
• Mastercard
• Mediclinic
• Mondelez
• Maersk
• PepsiCo
• Pfizer
• Pohjola
• Procter & Gamble
• Saab
• Scandinavian Airlines
• SEB
• Skandia
• Suntory
• Swedbank
• Telia
• T-Mobile
• United States Postal Service
• Volvo
• Walmart