Advanced Behavioral Therapy

Chief Operating Officer

Maharishi International University

➙ Managed $40M P&L while reducing costs by $12M through optimization
➙ Led 350-person non-academic organization including finance, facilities, security, hospitality, transportation, food service, sustainability, and fundraising
➙ Established PMO and continuous improvement program, standardizing methodologies across departments

Muller Media LLC

➙ Drove growth for MoneyUnder30.com and DoughRoller.net, leading to $12.5M combined exits through strategic sales
➙ Managed remote team of 25 across 5 countries while optimizing content operations and SEO performance
➙ Generated 100% year-over-year revenue growth through data-driven strategic planning and execution

Owner

XLMedia Plc

➙ Led global operations with $8M+ portfolio utilizing Looker Analytics to drive performance metrics and financial decisions
➙ Implemented agile methodology reducing costs 15% while doubling editorial output across international team
➙ Directed strategic digital transformation initiatives through technology integration and cross-functional partnerships

VP, Personal Finance/Interim COO

Highmark Inc.

➙ Created NICE call auditing system for nursing teams to optimize patient outcomes and reduce response times
➙ Built Skills Inventory System using Power BI analytics to identify and address organizational capability gaps
➙ Achieved $600K cost reduction through strategic process optimization during COVID-19 transformation

Director, Operations Support

➙ Built 30-person learning organization supporting 5,000+ employees across multiple business divisions
➙ Developed comprehensive skills assessment framework improving operational literacy rates by 50%
➙ Increased employee retention 10% through data-driven talent development and career pathing initiatives

Director, Learning and Development

Highmark Health

➙ Created enterprise-wide Leadership Accelerated Program spanning four rotations across major subsidiaries
➙ Enhanced recruiting effectiveness 50% through implementation of strategic talent analytics platform
➙ Improved cross-functional leadership retention 15% through structured rotation and mentorship program

Manager, Talent Management

Cleveland Clinic

➙ Achieved 100% compliance in executive and physician onboarding and coaching program across regional hospital network
➙ Reduced new leader time-to-productivity 25% through redesigned onboarding and readiness development framework
➙ Delivered measurable 10% improvement in leadership metrics through cohort training and coaching model

Organizational Effectiveness Consultant

➙ Improved operational leadership effectiveness 10% for 25 leaders through strategic training and coaching initiatives
➙ Built data-driven high-potential identification program expanding leadership talent pipeline across 3 regions
➙ Reduced leadership program delivery costs by 15% while maintaining quality and expanding regional reach

Leadership Development Consultant

Bank of America

➙ Increased revenue 5% by coaching front-line staff on effective communication strategies 
➙ Created continuing education program achieving 50% improvement in staff proficiency metrics 
➙ Enhanced team performance through mentoring and targeted skill development initiatives

Proficiency Coach

➙ Achieved 80% service level goal within three months through new training curriculum 
➙ Supported 200+ consumers with mortgage refinancing through financial analysis 
➙ Maintained high customer satisfaction while managing complex loan requirements

Home Services Specialist

➙ Reduced delinquency rates 10% through enhanced credit profile analysis
➙ Decreased annual write-offs by $1M through predictive modeling implementation
➙ Increased new hire productivity 300% through redesigned onboarding program

Credit Risk Analyst

Customer Marketing Sales Associate

Chief Operating Officer at Maharishi International University | 15+ Years in Continuous Improvement, Multisite Leadership & Strategic Planning

I transform underperforming organizations through data-driven operational excellence and strategic leadership, with a proven record of optimizing complex operations across healthcare, higher education, and financial services. I specialize in building high-performing teams while driving significant cost reductions and process improvements. My focus is on creating sustainable operational frameworks that drive both financial results and organizational growth.

Key Achievement: Recently led university-wide strategic transformation resulting in $12M in annualized savings (30% reduction) while maintaining service quality and operational integrity.

Core Skills:

• Operations Management & Process Optimization
• Strategic Planning & Execution 
• Change Management & Business Transformation
• Cost Reduction & Financial Analytics
• Team Leadership & Talent Development
• Performance Analytics & KPI Implementation

Technologies:

• Power BI Analytics
• Business Central
• Looker Analytics
• NICE Call Systems
• Microsoft Office Suite

Industry Expertise:

• Healthcare Operations
• Higher Education Administration
• Financial Services
• Digital Media & Technology
• Organizational Development
• Process Improvement

Christopher M. Muller

FedEx

As a Certified SAFe Practice Consultant, I drive enterprise-wide agile transformations at FedEx Custom Critical—a FedEx operating company.  I align IT operations with business strategy to enhance operational resilience and long-term agility. I focus on value chain optimization, ensuring that Agile, ITIL, and leadership development efforts integrate seamlessly to support strategic objectives.

I work directly with executives, product leaders, and IT teams to build sustainable, scalable agility. I create systems that improve delivery performance and drive business impact.

Key Contributions:
Strategic Assessments & Value Chain Alignment: Led an agile maturity assessment using SAFe and Scrum frameworks, incorporating ITIL and value chain principles to align IT delivery with enterprise strategy.

Executive Coaching & Leadership Alignment: Partnered with IT and Product Strategy leaders to establish a shared vision, ensuring cross-functional teams execute against cohesive roadmaps.

Scaling Business Agility: Designed and implemented a long-term agility roadmap, integrating agile frameworks, IT service management (ITSM), and leadership coaching to eliminate bottlenecks and improve adaptability.

Enterprise Training & Change Leadership: Delivered executive and team training on:
•	Flow Framework (optimizing value streams)
•	ADKAR Change Model (driving transformation)
•	Cynefin Framework (navigating complexity)
•	Situational Leadership (enhancing decision-making)

Operational Stabilization & Performance Gains: Standardized Agile Release Train (ART) activities by refining scrum events, formalizing working agreements, and implementing a program-level Definition of Done.

Impact & Measurable Results:
Increased predictability & efficiency – Raised pilot team story completion rates from 25% to over 80%

Improved delivery throughput – Boosted story throughput by 11% per Program Increment

Reduced volatility & enhanced forecasting – Lowered velocity variance from 74% to 21%

Agile Transformation Leader

Strateva Leadership Institute

Strateva Leadership Institute is a leadership research and publishing platform focused on emotional infrastructure, presence-based leadership, and complexity-informed systems.

As Founder and Research Fellow, I develop original intellectual property, including:
The Sophia Influence Model — a presence-based alternative to framework-led leadership
The Triangle Influence Diagnostic — a tool for identifying influence breakdowns under pressure
The Sophia Mood Compass — an emotional infrastructure tool for leadership availability and team cohesion

I author field guides, diagnostic tools, and practitioner-led research articles positioned for both OD journals and strategic leadership communities.

Current research areas include:
Fractal leadership systems
Presence as a repeatable leadership act
Organizational traction without escalation

I am actively pursuing public scholarship partnerships and grant funding to expand diagnostic validation and publish open-access influence tools for scholars and practitioners.

Founder & Research Fellow

Strateva Group LLC

Transforming Agile Leadership: Strategy-Driven, Execution-Focused, Future-Ready

I founded Strateva Group LLC to connect strategy with execution in Agile organizations. Through my work, I assist agile leaders, executives, and coaches in building the skills they need to create real business impact.

Key Contributions:

Leadership Development & Thought Leadership
•	Design and teach leadership strategies that help Agile coaches and executives drive real business outcomes.
•	Publish insights on next-generation Agile leadership, business agility, and strategy execution.
•	Teach transformation and agility classes, helping leaders and teams build the capabilities to lead successful change.

Strategic Advisory & Agile Leadership Coaching
•	Collaborate with executives, Agile coaches, and teams to cultivate leadership skills that foster change.
•	Partnered with organizations in technology, nonprofit, and telecommunications sectors to enhance leadership effectiveness and streamline value chain operations.

Coaching the Next Generation of Agile Leaders
•	Guide Agile leaders and product managers in navigating complex transformations and advancing into executive roles.
•	Create frameworks that extend beyond Agile coaching to genuine leadership development.
Vision & Mission:

Strateva Group LLC is dedicated to redefining Agile leadership and ensuring that today’s Agile professionals possess the strategic insight, leadership skills, and execution mindset crucial for success. Through thought leadership, education, and consulting, I empower leaders with the tools to drive transformation rather than merely facilitating it.

Principal Consultant – Agile Leadership

Sabre Corporation

Established a department of 15 members having a Director, a Manager, and a Supervisor as direct reports and a budget of $5 million and responsible for software assets in excess of $25 million.  Early adopter of scrum in the Enterprise Technology and Operations organization and quickly became one of the most successful scrum masters in the company. 

Transformed the department into two scrum teams.  Both teams were comprised of roles covering engineering, operations, software development, and QA. Provided agile coaching to those teams in addition to a VP-level organization and three Sr Director/Director organizations. 

I was recruited to Sabre to assess the financial feasibility of executing a turnaround of their messaging infrastructure.  Throughout Sabre’s history, the messaging infrastructure was outsourced to a managed service provider.  After an extensive evaluation, I proposed to the business unit leader (SVP), alliance leader (VP), and finance VP that we begin transitioning the support in-house.  

The scope of the programs included in my portfolio 
•	Establishing the global scrum teams including sourcing, hiring, and training
•	Establishing and enhancing the IT service broker
•	Establishing IT governance processes and vendor management approach 
•	Ensuring compliance to standards such as PII, PCI, GDPR 
•	Transitioning support
•	Stabilizing the environment and integrating into the enterprise functions
•	Transitioning team leadership to appropriate department

Results included the following:
•	transitioning support  four months early
•	transitioning team leadership one year early
•	completing the business case $3mm under projection

Upon a change in leadership at the CIO level, the strategy shifted to including migration to a hybrid cloud environment.  Through modernizing the messaging environment using ServiceNow, Ansible, and AWS, I managed a cross-functional effort to reduce the time to deploy new infrastructure from two weeks to two hours.

Senior Manager

Sprint

I assumed the leadership of a team of analysts that were responsible for designing the integration of a new enterprise system with Sprint's current retail and eCommerce systems.  The project had been stalled under the previous leadership and was costing the company $10mm per month.  I directed the turnaround of the stalled team.  Shifting the team members from a functional structure to a process structure of three scrum teams, the team regained momentum and completed the project in 28 days. 

Subsequently, I assumed a leadership role over a portion of Sprint’s IT infrastructure that had fallen into disrepair.  I established a series of programs intended to turn around the technology deployment.  Over the course of five years, reduced the number of priority incidents attributed to the technology from 15 per year to less than one per year.  

The programs I led included the following:
IT Currency
IT Governance
Technology
Compliance

Under the Technology program, I led several DevOps initiatives including:

An application team developed a process where they could deploy updates to their software frequently.  When they performed this action, they would need to engage another organization to assist them.  The application team's deployment cost an additional 30 mins to join this other team.  I led a cross-functional team to implement self-service functionality that allowed the application team to complete their deployments without that 30 min delay.

The use of physical hardware had gotten extremely cumbersome as we increased the use of leveraged platforms.  To increase agility, I led an effort to transition from physical hardware to virtual compute platforms.  The result of this effort included reduced toil affecting all operations users of the IT infrastructure, reduced number of incident tickets, and the elimination of a half FTE drain on my team.

Program Manager

Accenture

The number of Accenture's eCommerce-based engagements were increasing.  With each commitment, the project teams needed to conduct full searches of available technologies and architectures to produce the promised deliverables.  This process was an unnecessary expense to Accenture's clients and the inefficient use of Accenture's resources.  To resolve this situation, I led a team of senior technologists to create knowledge capital that contained a curated set of technologies and architectures based upon the types of engagements that Accenture would be conducting.  Through this knowledge capital, the project teams could deliver value to Accenture's clients; on average, four weeks earlier than before, the knowledge capital was available.

Manager

Most leadership models fail under pressure—because they weren’t built to hold it.
They assume the leader is stable. Clear. Trusted. But what if you’re not?

I build systems for that moment.

I'm a transformation strategist and author of Influence: The Sophia Model—a presence-based leadership model designed for complex environments where authority alone isn’t enough.

Sophia replaces compliance-driven change with replicable emotional infrastructure:  
Credibility. Clarity. Command. 
Not as traits—but as pressure-tested influence states.

I’ve developed:
- Diagnostic tools like the Triangle Influence Assessment and Sophia Mood Compass
- Field guides that apply presence-based leadership inside Agile and OD ecosystems
- Scholar-practitioner studies exploring fractal presence and emotional traction
- A strategic publishing model that turns research into real-world traction

I coach selectively. I publish deliberately. I build tools for leaders who don’t flinch.

Currently focused on:
- Publishing The Sophia Influence and related diagnostic tools  
- Running field pilots and publishing practitioner-academic hybrids  
- Partnering with transformation leaders building emotionally grounded systems

Who I work with:
- OD professionals bringing theory to the field  
- Agile and transformation leaders navigating influence breakdowns  
- Executives and educators shaping next-generation leadership models

Follow for sharp, pressure-tested leadership strategy.  
Subscribe if you want the research behind the model.  
Message me if you're building what comes after frameworks.

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The Battle

Christopher M. Muller

Markus Leonard

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