Chris Meyer

Chris Meyer’s mission is to anticipate and shape the future of business. He has pursued this goal as an entrepreneur, executive, consultant, author, and the leader of a think tank.

Chris has created new capabilities for each of the organizations he has served. He founded Monitor Networks, a Monitor Group company, and was Chief Executive from 2004 to 2009, when he became Founder of Monitor Talent. Prior to joining Monitor Group, he was the Director of the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, from 1995 until its closing in December 2002. The Center fostered the conversation of leading issues among the business community, developed public conferences, established new services and businesses, and shared what it learned with business practitioners. At the CBI, he founded and served on the Board of the Bios Group, a venture that invested in applications of complexity theory to business. Earlier, he was a Vice President and Group Head at Mercer Management Consulting (Now Oliver Wyman), where from 1984 to 1995 he founded and built the firm�s practice in the information industries, comprising telecommunications, hardware, software, and information services and media. And at Data Resources, an econometrics-based consulting firm, Chris developed the product offering for financial institutions.

Chris has published three books about adaptive enterprise and network-based innovation, including the BusinessWeek Best Seller Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, Future Wealth – the book on which Monitor Talent is based, and It�s Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business. He blogs on the Harvard Business Review site, and has contributed to publications including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. Chris’s fourth book, Standing on the Sun, will be published by Harvard Business School Press in January, 2012.

Chris holds BAs in both Mathematics and Economics from Brandeis University and a M.B.A. (with Distinction) from The Harvard Business School. In addition, he held a University Predoctoral Fellowship in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He attended Dalton, in New York City, and The Hotchkiss School.

He serves on the Boards of Icosystem, the Bankinter Foundation for Innovation, the Business Innovation Factory, and the New Rep Theater, and the Advisory Boards of Innocentive and LaunchCyte.

Chris lives in Boston with his wife, Mary, and has one Spanish- and Arabic-speaking musical daughter, at an undisclosed location.

PERSONAL JOURNEY: Every second year for the past 25, my father, my sister’s family, and my family have taken literal journeys, traveling together somewhere in the world for two to four weeks. This has created a kind of flip book, snapshots of the family as my niece grew up enough to bring a friend, then a boy friend, then my father died, then my daughter began bringing friends, my brother in law began aging.

The real journey has been in watching relationships change and seeing them in the context of individual growth and family evolution.

WEBSITE: www.christophermeyer.com

INTERESTING FACTS: I played baseball for my high school and college teams. I have a mad crush on linear algebra.

And I think the following story contains important wisdom: On my first trip to Beijing I was shown around by the son of a business colleague, a bi-cultural Chinese who had grown up in California. On our way to the Great Wall, we passed a gated community of enormous Tudor-style houses–they’d have cost $2 million. I asked him how this could be in a Communist country, and he replied: “In China, we’re very pragmatic. If it works, we call it Communism and move on.”

Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard, is one of my favorite plays. Stoppard manages to make an engrossing, entertaining drama out of an explanation of complexity theory, and includes a statement that I often affirm: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

I try to look for weak signals that things we believe are no longer valid and imagine what might have caused them and what could result.

I live in Boston with my wife, a consultant to NGOs. My daughter, a recent University of Chicago graduate, is looking for work with a social justice NGO in Cairo.