Dean Meyer

For almost three decades, designing and building high-performance organizations has been the life work and passion of consultant, lecturer and author N. Dean Meyer. One of the foremost authorities on the impact of organizations on people's performance, Dean Meyer is known for his systematic approaches to difficult leadership problems, his innovative and provocative ideas and his practical methods of transforming groups into high-performance entrepreneurial teams. A prolific writer, he has authored a library of magazine articles on a range of subjects such as organizational change, leadership, empowerment, structure, culture, architecture planning, strategic alignment, and spreading innovation.

Meyer co-authored, with Mary E. Boone, the 1987 McGraw-Hill book, The Information Edge, the definitive text on IS payoff which documents the method for measuring the so-called "intangible" value-added benefits of information technology. He is also the author of three books in a new paperback series from NDMA Publishing: Roadmap: How to Understand, Diagnose, and Fix Your Organization. Structural Cybernetics: An Overview and Decentralization: Fantasies, Failings, and Fundamentals. In addition, his original research, contributions to theory and years of experience building healthy organizations are documented in comprehensive studies that guide leaders through every step in the transformation process.

Meyer is the inventor of Structural Cybernetics, a scientific approach to organizational structure that treats organizations as dynamic systems. It provides a common language and clear principles to guide the design of organizations as a set of interlinked entrepreneurships. Structural Cybernetics also includes practical methods to build flexible cross-boundary teamwork, and a step-by-step implementation plan that details a well-tested process of participative change.

Meyer has pioneered the use of economics within organizations. His research on the Internal Economy provides a sound approach to resource management that puts budgeting and chargebacks in the broader context of an economic decision-making process. The Internal Economy includes a detailed, evolutionary implementation process that addresses backlogs, strategic alignment, and pressures for decentralization, while replacing bureaucracy with entrepreneurship.

Dean Meyer has worked in the information industry as a user, software designer, implementor, researcher, and consultant. A native of San Francisco, he started using computers as a teenager in the '60s when personal computers were a novelty. He began his career in 1968 at Stanford Research Institute in one of the first office systems research projects -- the group that invented the mouse, windowing, hypertext, desktop publishing, cooperative processing, and other industry-leading innovations.

He worked at SRI throughout his undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley (BS in business, 1973), and his graduate work at the Stanford Business School (MBA, 1976).

In 1976, Meyer joined Xerox in Rochester, NY, developing information tools for marketing and strategic planning. In 1978, he co-founded the Diebold Automated Office Program, hosting a series of conferences for leading IS executives. He popularized terms such as "value-added benefits," and "office automation."

In 1982, Meyer established his own company to focus exclusively on organizational leadership issues. He is now applying the structured thinking of his IS origins to the systematic design of healthy organizations.

Over the last 15 years, he has implemented transformations in dozens of medium-size to large organizations in the private and public sectors throughout North America. Whether facilitating a group of senior managers in participative organizational redesign, writing a magazine article challenging popular thinking, or addressing top executives on the science of leadership, Dean Meyer presents practical solutions to tough and elusive leadership problems.