Michael Meyer Naval nuclear engineer, pilot, historian, design artisan, business strategist, storyteller, and educator -- Michael Meyer, partner with Essential in San Francisco, leads executives and their organizations through the complex and challenging conversations of discovery that are critical to success during times of massive change. He draws on his frontline leadership experience to integrate and evolve a unique understanding that marries the business imperative with design awareness. Michael comes to Essential from Adaptive Path where he served as CEO and from frog design, where he led the company’s California studio as general manager, overseeing the firm’s physical and digital product design offering. Previously, he started and led the product strategy practice at IDEO’s Boston office. Michael’s led a wide range of projects: planning a new line of home electrical devices, crafting the vision and expressing the value proposition for a major pharmaceutical company’s internet presence, developing a next-generation electronic payment token, and leading the cockpit and cabin design of a new jet aircraft. His project teams have won two gold and two silver IDEA awards for their work. Meyer has a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley; an MBA from Harvard Business School, appointed as a Fellow of the Batten Institute, Darden GSBA, University of Virginia, where he has taught early-stage innovation and product development. He currently instructs at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego.