Dean McCauley

Dean McCauley is the Program Director for the Mergers & Acquisitions Executives Council at The Conference Board. Dean has been a strategy and M&A consultant for over 30 years at EY, CSC Index, Booz Allen & Hamilton (now Strategy&), and his own firms. He is a well-known specialist on the link between corporate strategy and M&A initiatives, and on the operational aspects of corporate transactions, including integrations, divestitures, and joint venture start-ups. He was one of the founding partners who built EY’s practice in M&A operations from startup to over 1,200 global practitioners prior to his retirement in 2018.

Dean has been the lead partner on many large, complex deals including Microsoft/Skype; Bally Technologies/SHFL Entertainment; Microsoft/Nokia (both the integration and later carve-out); Cisco/Webex; Hologic/Gen-Probe; Microsoft/LinkedIn; Beckman Coulter/Olympus Diagnostics (now part of Danaher); Zoran/Oak/RF Tuner (now part of Qualcomm); Marlin Equity Partners’ assembly of Aprimo; the transition of Starbucks’ DSD business to Nestlé; the carve-out of Health Net’s northeast business; the carve-out of Cisco’s video software business; and the stand-ups of the Molson/Miller joint venture and Caradigm, a health analytics JV between Microsoft and GE.

As an operating executive, Dean has served as a production manager in a semiconductor fab and as CEO of two companies. He also founded a consulting firm, Beyond the Arc, that is now focused on using big data to improve the customer experience. He is a widely published writer and frequent speaker on a variety of M&A and business strategy topics with over 125 published articles to his credit.

Dean holds a BS in engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.