Dimensional

Dimensional Fund Advisors is an investment management firm with a distinctive approach to investing based on the theory of efficient markets. As Dimensional approached its 30th anniversary, its leadership team was preparing to pass the torch to younger managers who would preside over an organization that had been transformed by growth in offices, people, products, and markets.
 
Founder and CEO David Booth put great stock in the values and principles that had guided the firm for nearly three decades. How could he make these principles explicit and transmit them to Dimensional’s next generation?
 
In 2008, Winthrop’s John Seaman, Dave Dyer, and Isabelle Lescent-Giles embarked on a project to do just that. Over six months they interviewed firm leaders, employees, shareholders, and members of the board, and scoured the still young firm for documentary materials, such as marketing materials and internal newsletters, that they could use to tell the story of the firm and its values as they had evolved together.
 
The result was a Master Narrative,™ a compact, rigorously researched narrative of Dimensional that went beyond the firm’s founding story to describe the origin and development of its guiding principles, put the firm’s achievements in perspective, and explain what made it distinctive in a crowded marketplace of money management firms. The master narrative quickly found several applications: as a discussion document for intergenerational dialogue among executives, and as an integral part of the firm’s orientation and training programs.