We bring six decades of experience in strategy, innovation, and team building
Who we are
After twenty years of marriage, living together but working apart, we’re giving our relationship the ultimate test by co-founding Tradecraft Central!
Between us, we’ve worked with leadership and management teams at more than 50 of the current Fortune 500 companies in dozens of industries, as well as organizations across the nonprofit and government sectors.
Chris Ertel
Chris is a social scientist with nearly three decades of experience as a consultant with four market-leading firms.
As a partner with Deloitte, Chris was on the leadership team of Greenhouse, a special forces team of 120+ professionals focused on designing and delivering high-stakes strategic conversations for the firm’s most important clients—as well as for Deloitte’s own Board of Directors and senior leadership teams.
More on Chris
At Deloitte, Chris was the co-creator of Team Alchemy, the firm’s client-facing market offering on team effectiveness, and oversaw its deployment with dozens of major US clients including many C-suite teams.
As a partner with Doblin (part of Monitor Group), Chris led design-based innovation projects to develop user-centric market offerings in consumer technology, life sciences, education, and more.
As co-head of practice at Global Business Network (GBN), Chris helped run the world’s then-leading scenario planning practice, with major clients in education, government, professional services, financial services, consumer goods, logistics, automotive, workplace design, and more.
Chris has extensive teaching experience, at the high school, collegiate, graduate school, and corporate training levels, including for hundreds of professionals at Deloitte in advanced consulting methods.
Chris holds a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and a doctorate in demography from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a voracious reader and music listener, and his tennis backhand is a constant work in progress.
Johanna Buurman
Johanna brings her native Dutch can-do pragmatism and three decades of global consulting experience.
A strategic generalist with a knack for getting things organized and making sure strategy and execution are data-driven and aligned, Johanna helps green ventures grow. As VP at a climate/prop-tech SaaS start-up company, she successfully (and profitably) stood up a new business unit providing value-added services to buyers of the software.
More on Johanna
As a trusted external advisor to global heads of real estate of Fortune 500 companies, Johanna has worked on a broad range of strategy and innovation initiatives at the intersection of business strategy, talent strategy and global footprint strategy–including portfolio strategy, sustainability, technology and digital transformation, and workplace strategy including Covid response.
As Managing Director at CBRE, Johanna sold and delivered highly complex, long-term real estate service agreements, built awesome teams, and managed with direct P&L responsibility.
At Toyota North America, Johanna co-led a special forces team that drove the company’s first ever global e-commerce strategy. She also developed and presented seminal research on the future of retailing to internal Toyota audiences across the globe, and was part of a skunk works team developing a distributed cogeneration device leveraging Toyota fuel cell technology.
At the Peterson Institute for International Economics, she had the privilege of working with some of the smartest minds in DC dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare in the global economy. She helped research and write a book evaluating the Uruguay Round of international trade negotiations.
Johanna holds a master’s degree from Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Foreign Service, and a bachelor’s in business administration from Nyenrode University in the Netherlands. Together with Chris she is raising a daughter who shares her love for and wonder of the natural world.