About the Author ix FACING PAGE The headquarters office on the Esri campus in Redlands, California. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jack and Laura continue to own and operate Esri as a privately held company without debt or venture capital, reinvesting about 30 percent of its annual revenue into research and development. They direct and oversee every facet of the business, which includes more than 6,000 employees, the Esri campus headquarters in Redlands, and dozens of offices worldwide. Today, Esri’s growing global user community includes millions of GIS professionals and hundreds of thousands of organizations in government, academia, business, and nonprofits, and its work supports virtually every field of human endeavor. Widely acknowledged as the leading visionary in the field of geographic information system (GIS) technology, Jack Dangermond is the cofounder and president of Esri. Jack and his wife, Laura Dangermond, launched Environmental Systems Research Institute (later shortened to Esri) in 1969 with a shared vision that systems thinking along with computer mapping and spatial analysis could help people design a better future. From their hometown in Redlands, California, they built their small consulting firm for land use planners into a world-leading developer of geospatial technology, including its ubiquitous software product, ArcGIS®. For more than 50 years, their vision has guided Esri’s GIS mapping and analytic technologies worldwide. Their involvement in conservation dates to high school, when they planted many of the stately ficus trees that line downtown Redlands streets today. In the decades since, they have designed parklands and donated thousands of trees to area schools and the community to support the local urban forest. More recently, they donated their purchase of 24,364 acres of grassland, chaparral, oak woodland, and forest along the Central California coast to The Nature Conservancy to protect a biodiverse landscape known as the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve. At home, Jack is a respected citrus and avocado grower and has been instrumental in bringing commuter train service back to Redlands for the first time in decades. Jack credits much of his success to his Dutch immigrant parents, who emigrated from the Netherlands and moved to Redlands in the 1920s and then opened a plant nursery in 1945, the same year he was born. Growing up in the nursery, Jack learned to nurture plants, serve customers, and understand the basics of business. In the years since, his life’s work has brought many honors, including the Planet and Humanity Medal from the International Geographical Union, the Champions of Earth Award from the United Nations, the Alexander Graham Bell Medal from the National Geographic Society, and more than a dozen honorary doctoral degrees. Jack has authored numerous papers on GIS and travels internationally to meet with world leaders and speak at conferences as an ambassador for the geographic approach.
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