Ken Carnes

With nearly three decades of experience in leadership, talent, and organizational performance, Ken Carnes helps organizations build the readiness required to perform today and sustain results tomorrow. As a Founding Partner of C2 Advising, he works with boards, executives, and leadership teams to translate leadership behavior into enterprise-level performance, resilience, and impact.

Ken speaks to thousands of leaders each year on leadership effectiveness, team performance, and personal impact. He is the author of four best-selling books, including the newly released Shadow Casting: How Executive Leadership Shapes Enterprise Performance. The book introduces Predictive Performance™, a practical, behavior-based discipline for understanding how executive actions shape clarity, alignment, decision quality, and results long before metrics reveal success or failure.

His work centers on the critical space between leadership intent and organizational impact, where performance is either enabled or quietly eroded. Rather than managing results after the fact, Ken helps leaders govern performance upstream by recognizing how their behavior becomes the operating environment for others.

Alongside his partner, Ryan Carnes, Ken also supports the development of emerging and core leaders across organizations. Ryan is the author of The Ready Set: How to Build the Leader Mindset, Habits, and Behaviors for What’s Next, which focuses on preparing leaders to navigate complexity, pressure, and increasing responsibility.

Through C2, Ken, Ryan, and their team partner with organizations across industries to strengthen talent selection, leadership impact, succession, and readiness at every level. Their shared belief is simple: sustainable success is built through trust, adaptability, and disciplined leadership behavior when it matters most.