John B. Powley consults internationally on business strategy, organization change and business process redesign. Much of his work is leading change programs at organizations undergoing mergers. In addition, he heads PBT, Inc. a management consulting firm dedicated to making companies more agile, more competitive and more profitable.

John has worked extensively with financial and high tech firms in the area of electronic commerce, sales force automation and call center operations. At Chemical Bank, in the wake of the Chemical / Manufacturers Hanover merger, John and a team of client managers identified a 17% reduction in the cost structure of the trust and custody business. Solutions included voice recognition for capture of trading instructions and workflow management in the in-bound call center. Enhancing risk management outweighed labor savings as justification for making the changes. John was instrumental in the development and roll-out of the change management program that caused the customer service representatives to feel that they had some say in the changes being made, and that the changes enabled them to be more in control and therefore more successful in their work.

John spent 14 years at Digital Equipment Corporation in a series of assignments to improve the competitiveness of Digital's manufacturing and design to manufacturing linkage. John and his team developed methodologies to analyze cost-benefit tradeoffs in manufacturing, applied advanced technologies to manufacturing, such as robotics, vision systems for circuit board inspection, advanced graphic interfaces for computer-assisted job shop scheduling, etc. John began Digital’s use of manufacturing process simulation tools and ultimately provided time sharing services to twenty-six manufacturing plants, some of which required simulation analysis before making any changes to the shop floor. John’s team developed four generations of manufacturing processes and associated workstation controllers for Digital’s circuit board assembly and managed the change processes in the manufacturing implementation.

He has a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics from M.I.T. and a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard University. He has taught systems analysis in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia.