The Authors
Herman Vantrappen and Frederic Wirtz are accomplished organization advisors and thought leaders. They work for companies and other organizations worldwide, of all sizes and across sectors.
Herman Vantrappen
Herman Vantrappen is the Managing Director of Akordeon, a strategic advisory firm. He serves large and medium-sized clients in a broad range of business sectors worldwide. Until 2012, he worked with the management consulting firm Arthur D. Little for 26 years, of which 19 as a Senior Partner. He was a member of the board of the firm’s global Strategy & Organization practice. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the firm’s flagship journal Prism for 7 years.
He has published numerous articles in a variety of journals, including Long Range Planning, MIT Sloan Management Review, Strategy & Leadership, Harvard Business Review, Nikkei Asian Review and Fortune. He is also the coauthor of the book Fad-Free Strategy: Rigorous Methods to Help Executives Make Strategic Choices Confidently (Routledge, 2020) and The Executive Action Writer (CreateSpace, 2009).
Vantrappen holds an MBA from Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) and an MS in Engineering from KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium).
Frederic Wirtz
Frederic Wirtz has more than 30 years of management consulting experience, focusing on strategy development and organizational performance improvement. He worked with Arthur D. Little for about two decades, where he was the Managing Director of the Benelux countries. At the turn of the millennium, he led the successful management buyout of the worldwide Arthur D. Little management consulting operations. Since leaving Arthur D. Little in 2008, he has developed and leads The Little Group, a corporate advice company working with clients worldwide. He is also a member of the board of directors of several organizations, and currently chairs the board of the Belgian Red Cross.
He has published various articles in journals such as the Harvard Business Review and Strategy & Leadership.
Wirtz holds a Business Economics degree from Antwerp University (Antwerp, Belgium). He also obtained an MBA degree from Indiana University (Bloomington, IN, USA), where he became a member of the International Honor Society Beta Gamma Sigma.
