Tom Gilb has been consulting on management problems for top management since 1962. As a result, he has developed and refined his powerful management planning methods. He has worked for many years with his son, Kai Gilb.

These methods are jointly called ‘Planguage’ – a Planning Language. They are unique in helping managers think quantitatively about the qualitative aspects of their decisions. For example, how can ‘engineering productivity’ or general product quality be quantified?

Most of the consultancy work is done at the CTO level for technical multinationals and some financial groups. It involves planning organizational improvement in productivity and quality (for 10,000 engineers, for example). The rest concerns big projects (like 1,000 engineers, $100 million).

Tom does not profile himself as a management consultant. In fact, he works at the grassroots of advanced engineering, systems, software, aircraft, IT, telecoms, and electronics.

This often leads to meeting top managers who appreciate his methods and become clients. His methods have been well-documented and successfully spread at HP, IBM (CMM 4), and Intel (20,000 engineers were trained there in his methods). Other interesting, famous method-user organizations are Boeing, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Philips, Ericsson, Nokia, Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Equinor, and many others, smaller and less famous.

In June 2024, Nicholas Coutts at GilbFest #25 told us of over 220 startup projects with a 3-year success rate of 83% using Toms Planguage (Competitive Engineering) ideas as a clear causal contributor. See "Some examples of technology for good.”

https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26703.09126 This made me prouder than all the big corporations we helped! I worked with him directly on some of these startups.

Tom has been invited to lecture at dozens of universities worldwide (including Berkeley, Stanford, London School of Economics, and Imperial College).

He has previously published nine paper books. The 2005 book is ‘Competitive Engineering.’

He spent two years (2014-2015) working on his book, ‘Value Planning,’ which is especially for top managers. It was published initially on LeanPub in 2016.

In 2018-2024, he produced about 35+ digital books, about five annually. Most are at Leanpub, Gilb.com, or https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tom-Gilb (with quite a few papers, slides, experiments, older book chapters, etc.). It is his way of leaving good technical ideas behind for when professionals grow to need and appreciate them even better!

In 2012, he was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Gilb.com has more information and many publications. A 'Tom Gilb' search will reveal things not mentioned here.

He lives in Norway, near Oslo, at the cabin in Summer Fjordside, and is both a Norwegian (as of December 2015) and a US Citizen (1940).

He is 'commercially retired' and avoids travel, but he is quite active in spreading his ideas, mentoring disciples, and learning what is going on.

Tom is not very impressed with the level of methods used by the IT/Agile gang. They are nowhere near serious about software and systems engineering. Far too many top managers and professors still cannot quantify critical values and qualities. Responsibility and motivation for serious success and quality seem lacking. Sad, the 'war against ourselves'.