John Callan

John Callan is Co-founder and Managing Director of Strategy Consultancy Ursa Major Associates, LLC , Founder and Chairman of the PostalVision 2020 Initiative, and Co-founder of Postal Pitch. John began his delivery industry career in 1974 by founding Calico Air Courier Service, growing it globally and selling it to rival DHL in 1979 where he became Vice President of Marketing. He spent the next few decades “pushing the postal/parcel envelope” while serving in senior officer positions at DHL, TNT Skypak, Purolator Courier, and a pioneer online shipping start-up, Milestone Systems, before beginning his strategy consulting practice advising USPS in 1997. Under Coopers & Lybrand and PwC, John thought-led projects on the USPS’s Package Services Business Plan, PostOffice Online, and International Business Unit strategy, leading to successful product introductions for Parcel Select, Click and Ship, and Global Express Guaranteed, respectively. John co-founded independent strategy consultancy Ursa Major Associates in 2001 where he advised leading mail and parcel delivery clients on strategic growth opportunities, including Pitney Bowes, FedEx, DHL Global Mail, Neopost, and USPS Office of Inspector General. He also coached many start-ups in the rapidly transforming ecommerce logistics ecosystem on go-to-market strategies. John continues to apply his broad value chain experience and expertise to clients large and small, often providing the unique value of bringing them together. With growing concern for the deleterious long-term impact of electronic communication on mail beginning in 2002, exacerbated by the Great Recession in 2008, John identified a need to stage an industry-wide independent, all-inclusive conversation about reinventing the postal ecosystem. He launched the PostalVision 2020 Initiative and staged its first experimental conference in 2011, followed each successive year by gathering representatives from all across the global postal-parcel-delivery ecosystem, including USPS, its major mailers and shippers, service providers, competitors, academics, unions, foreign posts, and increasingly opportunistic start-ups, in a conversation about the future. Having launched his career as a start-up himself, John has continued to nurture a keen interest in new ventures. In 2017 he co-founded the PostalPitch competition to serve as a launching pad for delivery ecosystem start-ups to meet the greater industry. Successful events have been staged in Geneva and Washington and will soon be held in Hamburg. As a well-known and highly respected postal and parcel delivery industry expert, John has appeared on CNBC, NPR’s Morning Edition and Marketplace, has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Kiplinger Letter, Post & Parcel, and E-Commerce Bytes, has authored Op-Eds for The Hill, is a familiar speaker at industry conferences in the U.S and abroad, and has written numerous articles for trade publications. John has served as a Board Director for the Parcel Shippers Association (PSA), ImageWare Systems (NASDAQ – IWSY), Immediate Mailing Services, Inc. (IMS), and Hurricane Island Outward Bound School. He has an BA in Russian from the University of North Carolina where he was a Morehead Scholar.