Our Team
First Principles Leadership is a team of transformation advisors and operational leaders dedicated to helping organizations improve by focusing on people, real work, and first-principles thinking.
Craig Stritar
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
San Francisco Bay Area
Craig brings leadership experience from high-velocity teams in military special operations, as well as organizations in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and education. He combines this with a foundation in continuous improvement, shaped by close collaboration with manufacturing leaders from Danaher, healthcare innovator and MIT professor Steven Spear, and Fortune 500 CEO and Deming protégé Joseph S. Hood. His approach is rooted in people-centric systems thinking and a passion for developing high-performing, resilient teams.
Craig is internationally recognized for uncovering the true origins of “takt time,” a concept widely but mistakenly believed to have originated in Germany. Through research and translation of early scientific management works, he demonstrated that takt time was first developed in late 19th-century Poland as a means to harmonize human-to-human and human-to-machine interactions. In his own work, Craig has shown that lasting organizational excellence comes from aligning rhythm, teamwork, and human well-being, making harmony a foundational principle for improvement. This focus on harmony continues to shape Craig’s unique approach, where operational flow and human flourishing go hand in hand.
Craig is one of the very few practitioners to have led measurable, lasting, organization-wide transformation in healthcare, creating a daily learning and improvement culture that continued to thrive long after major leadership turnover. The systems and practices he established, including daily rounding and kata experimentation cycles, are now cited as benchmarks across the Lean and continuous improvement community. In addition, through collaborative work with MIT professor Steven Spear, Craig was the first to test the See2Solve real-time issue-tracking system in a healthcare environment, empowering teams to quickly surface, track, and address operational problems.
Dr. Karem Roitman
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
London, UK
Karem is a global leader in organizational learning, leadership development, curriculum design, and social inclusion, igniting curiosity and creativity in education and business. With a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford, she has transformed systems across five continents, empowering teams to solve problems collaboratively and thrive in dynamic environments.
Karem designs learning experiences that blend rigorous scholarship with a spirit of playful exploration, fostering environments where innovation flourishes. She authored Oxford University Press’ Global Skills curriculum, implemented in over 100 schools worldwide, and trained 5,000+ educators to cultivate critical thinking through real-world challenges. As founder of Thinkers Meet Up, a virtual learning community for gifted students, she creates programs that nurture creativity and curiosity. Her latest book, Seeking the Perfect World: A Critical Discussion of Global Challenges for the Bright and Curious (Routledge, 2024), inspires young leaders to tackle global issues with intellectual clarity and human connection.
A sought-after speaker, Karem translates complex ideas into practical strategies for educators, leaders, and organizations. Her first-principles approach—rooted in harmonizing human potential with systemic goals—has driven measurable impact in diverse contexts, from Latin America to Asia and Africa. Exploring a new venture to amplify this impact, Karem is dedicated to building inclusive, learning-driven systems where individuals and teams reach their full potential.
Friends and Fellow First-Principles Thinkers
Independent thinkers whose work reflects shared principles, intellectual rigor, and respect for real work.
Mark focuses on building improvement cultures that last by emphasizing people over tools. Known for his “Don’t Deploy, Diffuse” philosophy, he challenges organizations to slow down, think deeply, and create the conditions for learning to spread naturally. His writing on The Lean Thinker continues to influence practitioners seeking rigorous, human-centered approaches to change.
Mark Rosenthal
After early training in applied probability and time spent in Japan, exposure to factory life and the Toyota Production System led Michel to leave academia for the pragmatism of production. Through such books as Working with Machines and Lean Assembly, along with his blog, teaching, and consulting, he continues to insist on clarity, observation, and respect for the human dimension of manufacturing.