Strategic Leadership

Oliver W. Olson was one of the founders of Maastricht School of Management Romania and was that school’s first Dean and Academic Director.

He has served as the Academic Director for the creation of the International Academy of Retail Banking, a division of the London based Lafferty Group. He has previously been the Country Manager for CEU Business School, Romania, and has held various roles at CEU Business School in Budapest serving as the MBA Program Director and Director of Degree Programs Administration. Prior to joining the CEU Business School, Mr. Olson started his professional career as an Export Product Manager for Salamander Shoes in Stuttgart, Germany in the 90’s. He then moved to the USA where he worked in banking for almost a decade, including stints as Assistant Vice President at Bank of America, Senior Manager for a major credit card company and the CIO of a community bank in Dallas, Texas.

Mr. Olson earned his Undergraduate Degree in International Business and German from California State University, Fullerton and his MBA from the University of Texas, Dallas. He is fluent in German and can hold his own in Swedish and Romanian. Oliver is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Steven Tallman is an Advisory Partner at Bain & Company, the international management consultancy, where he has spent his entire 35+ year career helping build the firm into a global leader. From 2000 to 2020, Steven served on Bain's Global Operating Committee as Head of Global Operations, overseeing the firm's exponential growth from 20 to 67 offices worldwide—a five-fold expansion—while managing technology services, global training, knowledge management, consulting operations, and strategic capability centers across multiple continents. Throughout his tenure, Steven has worked in eight countries including San Francisco, Tokyo, Moscow, Warsaw, Boston, London, Delhi, Brussels, and Amsterdam, gaining extensive experience in leading complex global operations and driving organizational transformation at scale. He also served as Bain's Sustainability Officer, guiding the firm to nine consecutive years of carbon neutrality. Steven graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Davis and was named by the Financial Times in 2013 as one of the top 25 most influential LGBT business executives. Steven is also a recent graduate of the Executive Master in Cultural Leadership at Maastricht University and the Royal Academy of Arts London.

Juuso Hämäläinen Juuso Hämäläinen is the Founder and CEO of Tangible Growth, a SaaS company focused on strategy execution and culture transformation, where he helps organizations become more purpose-driven and gain execution confidence in rapidly changing business environments. As a seasoned transformation executive, Juuso has worked with companies of all sizes—from global enterprises to startups and large public sector organizations - tackling critical leadership challenges and scaling execution capabilities as organizations grow in complexity. Juuso is also experienced in post-merger integration and culture transformations. He is a frequent keynote and guest lecturer on strategic agility and is the author of a book on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that has been released in Finnish, English and French. His expertise centers on bridging the gap between strategic aspiration and operational execution, addressing the core challenge that causes 70-90% of organizational transformations to fail: not lack of vision, but the difficulty of scaling execution and innovation.