Carl Spetzler's Email & Phone

Over the past three decades, Carl Spetzler has been a leader in strategy and innovation processes, helping corporate leaders cope with the lack of explicit strategic alternatives, deal with the complexities of uncertainty and risk over long time horizons, and achieve lasting change. carls120x90.png Carl Spetzler, Chairman and CEO * 100 Most Influential People in Finance, Treasury and Risk magazine * Conceived first Cash Management Account at Merrill Lynch * Established the Decision Education Foundation * MBA, PhD from Illinois Institute for Technology He works with top management and boards of directors to improve the quality of decisions and decision-making processes. His methods stress that boards be collaboratively engaged in a few truly strategic decisions rather than simply serve in an approval role on a myriad of items. In addition to serving as the chairman and CEO of SDG, Dr. Spetzler leads the firm's North American Strategy Practice. Before co-founding SDG, Dr. Spetzler directed the Financial Industries and Strategic Methodologies Center at SRI International. While there, he led a consulting engagement that changed the landscape of American financial services. Dr. Spetzler and the SRI team persuaded Merrill Lynch that the time was right to offer a one-stop financial service, called the Cash Management Account (CMA). Although Merrill Lynch initially resisted such a sweeping and unsettling change, it pursued the opportunity and by the mid-1980s more than 1 million customers used CMAs. Dr. Spetzler received an MBA and a PhD in economics and business administration and BS in chemical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He serves on the boards of IIT and the Decision Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the decision-making skills of youth. In 2004, Dr. Spetzler received The Ramsey Medal, the highest honor awarded by the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS for lifetime contributions to the field. In 2006, he was elected to the SRI Hall of Fame for his leadership in the growth of decision analysis at SRI and for his key role in instigating a fundamental change in the US financial service industry. In 2008, Dr. Spetzler was named by Treasury & Risk magazine one of the 100 most influential people in finance for his work in Enterprise Risk Management.