Hunter Muller

Founder, President and CEO HMG Strategy

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Hunter Muller is the Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of HMG Strategy, LLC, a Westport, Connecticut firm built around a simple proposition: that senior technology executives learn more from each other than from analysts. HMG runs peer-to-peer CIO and CISO executive leadership summits in major US cities - it describes itself as the world’s only “no-analyst” advisory service - alongside an awards programme, research and a digital platform the company says reaches more than 400,000 CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, CDOs and senior business technology executives. Muller established it in 2008 after twenty years running his own management consultancy and then The Advisory Council, and has written five books for John Wiley & Sons on how technology leaders should operate. The firm remains active, with a 2026 summit calendar open for registration.

Career Highlights

• Founded HMG Strategy in 2008 and continues to lead it as Founder, President and CEO.
• Runs CIO and CISO executive leadership summits across major US cities, with the 2026 calendar open for registration as of September 2026.
• Wrote five books published by John Wiley & Sons: The Transformational CIO (2011), On Top of the Cloud (2012), Leading the Epic Revolution (2013), The Big Shift in IT Leadership (2015) and The CEO of Technology (2018).
• Created the Transformational CIO Awards, which ran from 2012 to 2017, and the successor programmes that followed it - Technology Executives to Watch (2018-2019), Global Technology Executives Who Matter (2020) and the Global Leadership Institute Awards, now taking 2026-2027 nominations.
• Built a platform the company describes as reaching more than 400,000 technology executives.
• Advised Fortune 2000 executives on strategic planning and career ascent for more than thirty years, by HMG’s own account.

Professional Journey

Muller began as an IT consultant, working with companies including Gartner, IBM and Unilever - the one part of his early career that HMG Strategy’s own materials still set out. In 1988 he founded Hunter Management Group, an executive consulting practice, and from 2003 to 2008 he was President and CEO of The Advisory Council.

He founded HMG Strategy in 2008. The premise separating it from the analyst firms it competes with is that chief information officers and chief information security officers get better guidance from their peers than from vendors or from paid analysts, and that the useful product is therefore the room rather than the report. HMG’s core business is a calendar of regional CIO and CISO executive leadership summits, supported by VIP dinners, research, a digital resource centre and partnerships with vendors and executive search firms.

Recognition has been a recurring instrument. Muller launched the Transformational CIO Awards in 2012 and ran them through 2017, then replaced them with a succession of renamed programmes: Technology Executives to Watch in 2018 and 2019, Global Technology Executives Who Matter in 2020, and the Global Leadership Institute Awards, whose 2026-2027 nominations are currently open. Each iteration serves the same purpose of anchoring the network and giving members a reason to nominate one another.

Alongside the events he has written five books for John Wiley & Sons across seven years, beginning with The Transformational CIO in 2011 and ending with The CEO of Technology in 2018 - a sequence that tracks the argument he has made throughout, that the technology executive’s job moved from running infrastructure to running a business function with its own growth agenda. The firm’s site was last updated in August 2026 and its summit programme continues.

Education

No degree, institution or graduation year was found for Hunter Muller in any source consulted, including HMG Strategy’s own About Us page, its home page, his CPO Magazine author biography and the press release announcing his fifth book.