John Carter
In these times, Carter believes it is always best to assume that trouble rides a fast horse. That’s why his unusual strategic consultancy uses narrative tools to speed up and drive home a highly potent form of decision-making. Decisions based on radical clarity and imaginative leaps of mental agility.
His consultancy, JCarter&Crew, is designed to help organizations that can’t outride trouble…at least out last it. And he does it by taking a very different position on the root cause of most corporate pain and suffering:
Carter believes:
Behind all the distracting symptoms that command executive level attention in times of trouble, there always hides a dysfunctional, beloved, addictive tribal story rotten with flawed assumptions and propped up by dangerous servants of the status quo.
To change the future, Carter believes you don’t have to get rid of the people but you must kill the old stories and restore narrative integrity to an organization. The kind of integrity that rigorously winnows out the insidious propaganda addiction common today in almost every kind of enterprise. Local or global.
Where did Carter get these strange, counter-intuitive ideas? He got them working as a senior executive for four of the world’s largest global media conglomerates. He got them being an executive creative director back when the job really mattered. He got them running a troubleshooting consultancy with clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups. He got them becoming old friends with the Euro, the Kroner, the Yen, and the Peso. He got them attending institutions of unlikely learning, participating in think tanks, playing cat and mouse as a U.S. Navy crypto officer. And he got them experimenting in alternate ways to make decisions faster and better under conditions of great ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity and volatility. But perhaps his greatest source of wisdom comes from tirelessly working to find clever, creative ways to get minds that don’t want to open…to open.
No wonder the idea of The Crossroads Group fascinated him. With his past, how could he resist a collaborative league of unusual minds for unusual times?
