The Journey to Positive Eye Consulting from Jean Meeks, PhD on Vimeo.
Jean Meeks, founder of positive eye consulting™, is a passionate and energetic organizational strategist. With more than two decades of executive management experience, Jean builds empowered partnerships that are focused on creating sustainable, bottom-line profits.
Jean’s multidimensional perspective of organizational transformation and change stems partly from her own personal experiences. Her life has been both punctuated by success and marred by tragedy, but she doesn’t view the experiences of life as inherently good or bad. She believes that we start with our strengths and refine them as we go. She explains that the triumphs that elevate us and the events that befall us help us grow as people and bring us closer to understanding ourselves.
“These are the experiences that shape us,” Jean says. “The true tragedy is experiencing something and not allowing it to matter. Staying complacent in the face of experiences that shape us is the worst thing we can do.”
In October 1996, Jean, then a successful businesswoman with a growing family, learned that her husband had died in a car crash near Yellowstone National Park. Instantly, her identity changed to that of a single mother in charge of a major construction firm with $25 to $30 million in outstanding projects. Rather than scrap the business her husband worked so hard to build, she chose to honor his memory by remaining at the helm of the company. She had four kids to care for, 125 workers on the payroll and 60 days to take her contractor’s licensing exam.
“It was completely overwhelming,” Jean recalls. “I give a lot of credit to my mother. Long before the founding of Nike, she would say, ‘Don’t think about it, just do it.’ All my life, that’s been my mantra.”
Jean’s mother, the first woman on the faculty at a prominent medical school, set a powerful example for her to follow. And from an early age, Jean showed she had a knack for taking charge of situations. She jokes that she was an organizational strategist since kindergarten, where she had a propensity for trying to control the classroom. By the age of 14 she was coaching several hundred figure skaters, young and old, in the Minnesota region where she grew up, after her hopes of competing were dashed by a serious car accident.
After receiving a degree in accounting and working in engineering and architecture, Jean moved to Las Vegas. There, she helped turn around a struggling ice rink. Her business plan was to pack the ice with skaters as many hours of the day as possible. She launched a popular semi-pro hockey team and brought hundreds of Canadian hockey players to town on junkets that combined tourism with recreational tournaments.
Following a year in charge of her late husband’s construction firm, Jean relocated to continue her education. She earned a master of accountancy degree at Southern Utah University and a Ph.D. in organization systems at Saybrook University in San Francisco.
She served on faculty in the Management Department at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business. In her course, “Management – Valuing the People,” she helped students from a variety of majors to become visionary leaders and managers in their chosen professions.
Jean is sought after by management teams around the country, including several of NASA’s centers, for her expertise and unique management change model. Her work focuses on aligning and restructuring everything from HR and financial systems to strategic marketing plan implementation, core production process improvement, customer service and fulfillment solutions. Although she’s also in demand as an inspirational speaker, Meeks doesn’t see herself as a motivational expert but rather as someone who helps find the elusive missing pieces that lead to fulfillment and success. Jean calls this “Stepping into Your Greatness: Designing an Integrated Lifestyle.”