Joe Casola

Joe Casola is a Principal at ghSMART. He advises executives on their most pressing leadership and organizational challenges, including talent assessment, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness.

Prior to ghSMART, Joe worked in corporate strategy at Capital One, where he led strategy projects across multiple lines of business. He helped the CEO develop the company’s annual strategy and communicate it to the Board of Directors and all Capital One associates. Beyond project work, he led the Manager Training Committee, spearheaded the class champion program to support new joiners, served as a development manager for associates and managers, and was heavily involved in recruiting.

Previously, he was at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant, where he served private equity and corporate clients on M&A, strategy, and organizational transformation projects across industries with a focus on consumer and animal health. He was a top rated faculty member for internal new associate and intern training, a top rated people leader, and the Mid Atlantic Office recruiting ambassador. Before McKinsey, he worked at Alyeska Investment Group, a long/short market neutral equity hedge fund, where he was an equity investor in their consumer & retail group with stints in industrials, healthcare, and technology. He started his career at Deloitte Consulting.

Joe has an MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he graduated Beta Gamma Sigma with honors distinction. He co-chaired the Investment Management Group and the Hedge Fund Group and served as a Portfolio Manager for the Student Management Investment Fund (SMIF). He won the Ross Investment Competition, a national stock pitch competition for business students, and ran the Chicago Booth Investment Management Conference.

Joe has undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Chemistry from Virginia Tech, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with summa cum laude distinction. While at Virginia Tech, he conducted original mathematics and chemistry lab research, was a teaching assistant for Differential Equations, and co-founded a non-profit that used an innovative funding strategy to help supply renewable energy to rural villages in Nicaragua.