John Thomas Grinder Jr.[1] (/ˈɡrɪndər/ GRIN-dər; born January 10, 1940) is an American linguist, writer, management consultant, trainer and speaker.

He is co-director of Quantum Leap Inc., a management consulting firm founded by his partner Carmen Bostic St. Clair in 1987 (Grinder joined in 1989).

Grinder then entered the United States Army and served as a captain in the US Special Forces in Europe during the Cold War; following this he went on to work for a US intelligence agency.

[7] After receiving his doctorate, Grinder took a full-time position as an assistant professor in the linguistics faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Grinder co-authored, with Suzette Elgin, a linguistics text book titled A Guide to Transformational Grammar: History, Theory, Practice.

[13] In 2005, Grinder published Steps to an Ecology of Emergence[14] with Tom Malloy and Carmen Bostic St Clair in the journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing.

In 1972 (during Grinder's stint at UCSC) Richard Bandler, an undergraduate student of psychology, approached him for assistance in specific aspects of modeling Gestalt therapy.

During this period, a creative group of students and psychotherapists were asked to join including Robert Dilts, Leslie Cameron-Bandler, Judith DeLozier, Stephen Gilligan and David Gordon (All of whom are considered the second generation of co-developers; recruited by Bandler, Grinder and Pucelik after the original team graduated from university).

Grinder and Delozier presented an aesthetic framework for the "classic code" of NLP that explicates the involvement of ecology and the unconscious mind in change-work.

In 2001, Grinder (with Bostic St Clair) published Whispering in the Wind with a "set of recommendations as to how specifically NLP can improve its practice and take its rightful place as a scientifically based endeavor with its precise focus on modeling of the extremes of human behavior: excellence and the high performers who actually do it".

[18] Grinder has since begun to strongly encourage the field to make a recommitment to what he considers the core activity of NLP: modeling.