Our team
Two partners. You will work with one of us.
First Principles Leadership is deliberately small. Engagements are led personally rather than staffed out to a bench, which is a constraint on how much work we take and the reason the work is what it is.
Craig Stritar
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
San Francisco Bay Area
Craig has spent over two decades developing high velocity teams, starting as a leader in military special operations before moving through healthcare, production and distribution, biotech, aviation, startups and Alaskan commercial fishing. For more than ten years he has focused almost entirely on organizational transformation: developing people through perfect practice, and accelerating how fast learning spreads by taking leaders down to the physics of it.
His approach was shaped by close work with manufacturing leaders from Danaher, with healthcare innovator and MIT professor Steven Spear, and with Fortune 500 chief executive and Deming protégé Joseph S. Hood, who mentored his Lean Six Sigma master black belt.
The transformation record
Craig is one of relatively few practitioners to have led measurable, lasting, organization-wide transformation in healthcare. At a 3,000 employee regional health system he designed and installed a daily management system reaching every department across inpatient, outpatient and support services, and built the internal coaching capability that let teams sustain it. It held through subsequent executive leadership transitions. The work was presented at the national Kata Summit and featured by the Lean Enterprise Institute and in AME Target Magazine.
In collaboration with Steven Spear, he ran the first test in a healthcare setting of a real time issue reporting system, letting front line staff surface, track and escalate operational problems as they happened.
The research
Craig is internationally recognized for uncovering the 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 showed that the underlying idea was developed in late nineteenth century Poland as a way of harmonizing human to human and human to machine interaction.
With Olga Stritar he translated Harmonic Leadership: The Collected Works of Karol Adamiecki and Henry Le Chatelier's Philosophy of the Taylor System, both 2023, the first English editions of either. All of that material is free in the Learning Center.
The research and the practice point the same way: lasting organizational excellence comes from aligning rhythm, teamwork and human wellbeing, which is why harmony rather than efficiency is the organizing idea in his work.
Background
Squad leader, 3rd Ranger Battalion, US Army. BSc in Sociology, Arizona State University. Lean Six Sigma master black belt. Certifications in Kata for Daily Improvement from the University of Michigan College of Engineering, TWI Job Instruction from the TWI Institute, 3P facilitation from Virginia Mason Medical Center, Just Culture, and a deep dive into the Menlo Way at Menlo Innovations.
He is acknowledged as a contributing colleague in Mike Rother's Toyota Kata Practice Guide, and is a regular contributor to the Lean Enterprise Institute blog.
Craig also holds a California general contractor license, Class B General Building, which informs the Construction work. He enjoys consulting, writing, driving fast electric cars, and the outdoors with his wife Olga in the Bay Area.
Dr Karem Roitman
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
London, UK
Karem is a global leader in organisational learning, leadership development, curriculum design and social inclusion, igniting curiosity and creativity in education and in 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 demanding environments.
She designs learning experiences that blend rigorous scholarship with a spirit of playful exploration, building environments where innovation can actually happen rather than being asked for.
Curriculum and teaching at scale
Karem authored Oxford University Press's Global Skills curriculum, part of the Oxford International Curriculum, now implemented in over 100 schools worldwide, and has trained more than 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 has built programmes serving over 500 families with 25 scholars, designed to nurture creativity and curiosity rather than accelerate through material.
Her most recent book, Seeking the Perfect World: A Critical Discussion of Global Challenges for the Bright and Curious (Routledge, 2024), is written to help young leaders approach global problems with intellectual clarity and human connection.
Practice
A sought-after speaker, Karem translates complex ideas into practical strategies for educators, leaders and organisations. Her first-principles approach, rooted in harmonising human potential with systemic goals, has driven measurable impact in contexts from Latin America to Asia and Africa.
She leads FPL's work in education, and the learning design and leadership development side of engagements across every other sector. She is building the practice she has spent her career preparing for: inclusive, learning-driven systems where individuals and teams reach their full potential.
How we split the work
Who leads what.
Craig leads operational and technical systems, lean transformation, 3P design events, and daily management. Karem leads learning design, leadership development, curriculum and inclusion. Most engagements need both, and a proposal will always say which partner leads which workstream rather than leaving it implied.
Neither of us is the senior partner. The order of the two biographies above is nothing more than the order they were written in.
Curious how this would work on your team?
Book a discovery conversation. We will ask what you are trying to achieve and what is getting in the way, which is also how every engagement starts. Practical conversation, no sales pitch.