Spencer Johnson (November 24, 1938 – July 3, 2017) was an American physician and author of business and self-help books. Born in Watertown, South Dakota, he took a psychology degree at the University of Southern California and a medical degree at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He wrote the ValueTales series of illustrated children's biographies in the 1970s before co-writing The One Minute Manager (1982) with Ken Blanchard. His 1998 parable Who Moved My Cheese? became a long-running bestseller and has been translated into dozens of languages; he followed it with The Present (2003) and Peaks and Valleys (2009). He died in California of complications from pancreatic cancer, and a sequel, Out of the Maze, was published posthumously in 2018.
