Alexandru Cârstoiu

Alexandru Cârstoiu (Alexandru Carstoiu, Alec Carstoiu) is a Romanian management consultant, Founder and Chief Operating Officer of LOOK SMART. Based in Bucharest and working internationally, he specialises in corporate governance, operational transformation, executive advisory, enterprise risk, internal audit, information security and business process optimisation.

He has more than 27 years of professional experience across 15+ industries, including more than 20 years within international holding-type groups, and is an Associate Lecturer at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (ASE).

What sets Alexandru apart in the consulting market is perspective: for decades he has built systems and organisations from within, holding senior executive roles while delivering the implementation himself. That experience gives him a practical radar for what actually works in operations - and a low tolerance for solutions that look good on paper but produce no results on the ground.

He believes a leader's role is to build a system that works even in the leader's absence. If an organisation depends permanently on one person to make decisions or solve problems, no system has been built - only a dependency.

Alexandru began his career in 1998 in the banking sector, where in under four years he rose from account administrator to head of accounting, IT and human resources, coordinating three critical departments simultaneously across a network of more than 150 branches during a demanding restructuring. It was a hard, formative professional start that taught him financial discipline and real pressure early.

He then spent several years as IT&C Director for one of Romania's largest construction companies, coordinating IT strategy and operations for four group companies and delivering, among other systems, one of the most complex project-planning platforms in the country at the time and Romania's first integrated HR and payroll platform. There he learned to build systems at scale and to manage projects with real stakes.

As part of more than 20 years spent within international holding-type groups, for almost 17 of them he held senior roles in one of Romania's largest and most complex private groups, working across more than 15 business entities whose objects of activity spanned automotive distribution, aviation, real estate, financial services, retail, energy and the non-profit sector. Within his areas of responsibility he coordinated actions and projects across these entities, holding - successively and at times simultaneously - four complementary mandates: IT project manager, internal auditor, special-projects and operational-integration manager and, for his final six and a half years, Director of Information Security (CISO).

Since December 2009, he has been Founder and Chief Operating Officer of LOOK SMART - a firm built with a clear ambition: to be precise, not large. Alongside consulting, he teaches at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (ASE).

Alongside his entrepreneurial and executive work, Alexandru is an Associate Lecturer at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (ASE), Faculty of Management and Public Administration, where he holds the chairs of Human Resources Audit and Work Quality Analysis at bachelor and master level. He teaches through real case studies, emphasising how concepts work in business decisions, not only in the bibliography.

Under LOOK SMART he authors premium executive studies made freely available to the market. The most recent, AI Under Control, is an executive analysis of EU AI Act governance for leaders preparing for the regulated era of artificial intelligence.

His published work covers management consulting, corporate governance, operational transformation, information security, business process optimisation and AI governance, including executive analysis of the EU AI Act and the organisational governance of artificial intelligence.