Working with CEOs and senior leaders to navigate complex challenges, drive innovation and achieve a bold vision for the future.
A Little About Me
I’m Diana Wu David, a former Financial Times executive with 30 years of corporate multinational and venture-backed start-up P&L experience. My clients share a passion for finding better ways to lead and work that leads to breakthrough results. Recognized as a Top 50 Global Future of Work Thought Leader and author of the best-selling book, Future Proof: Reinventing Work in the Age of Acceleration. My leadership journey began working for Dr. Henry Kissinger.
Does this sound like you?
You are a CEO or member of a senior leadership team who needs to navigate complex challenges, drive innovation and achieve a bold vision for the future.
You want to inspire, motivate and lead your people to surf the waves of uncertainty and change.
You want to foster a culture of innovation and possibility, leveraging new ways of working and collaborating.
You focus on impact and success that includes but also goes beyond just the numbers. It’s never just about the numbers.
You recognize the importance of continually strengthening your own leadership skills and capabilities to become the leader everyone wants to follow to create a bold new future.
Why Work With Me?
Your organization is structured around what works now, but not necessarily what will work in the future. You may be stuck in a rut and worried that you aren’t innovating enough to keep up with your customers and disruptive trends. You have an inkling that you could go further, faster.
If you have a bold vision of “what’s next”, you are frustrated because you don’t have the buy-in and commitment from your people in order to make it happen. There is a lack of cooperation, collaboration and engagement.
You’re sick and tired of spending your time on too many things, and so is your team. The lack of clarity and focus is reducing your ability to make an impact and get the kind of return on investment that would allow you to truly unlock your potential.
I Help You
1. Create clarity for your business by reviewing and prioritizing future possibilities and creating a clear vision with your team.
2. Align people, overcome overwhelm and inspire commitment around future strategies around products, services, projects or initiatives. Rather than feedback on the past, gain feed-forward input and accountability around what is possible and create structure and a culture to support the vision.
3. Unlock resources and new levels of energy, focus, collaboration, and productivity by upskilling the way you organize and communicate.
“If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.”
What Can You Expect to Gain from Working with Me?
You and your team will have a process and method to rally around shared future goals. You will be equipped with tools and practices suited to today’s complex and interconnected challenges.
You will be better at articulating what the future looks like, feels like, tastes like and everyone’s role in that shared vision.
You will have deliberate practices to upgrade your or your team’s leadership and collaboration. People can engage and organize in a way that supports their best work and a sustainable people strategy.
You have more opportunities to ensure your impact and positive legacy as a leader in the organization and for the organization as a whole.
How Do I Work with My Clients?
I work with corporate clients via bespoke programs that focus on the intersection of leadership and strategy for the future. Individuals can join my group program.
In most cases, I work with clients for 3-6 months, sometimes more. This includes 1:1 CEO, senior leadership or team coaching. Board Effectiveness and consulting may cover a similar timeline but with a different cadence.
Once we agree to go forward, we will have an initial strategy session to agree on key goals and milestones.
With a defined outcome (e.g. coaching goals, designing a new strategic plan, developing a career pathway framework and succession plan, inspiring a team at an offsite), we may interview key stakeholders, gather resources (e.g. past plans, surveys, performance reviews, prior work) or review benchmarks from outside organizations.
We then partner with you to help you design programmes or interventions and enhanced leadership practices to support your goals. This includes resources as appropriate from our Future Proof frameworks, facilitation and online, plug-and-play platforms which can be used for scale across the organization.
My primary goal is to work with you to envision the possibilities and upgrade leadership and interpersonal skills to continue innovating and re-aligning.
What is Special About My Work?
My work is fueled by the Future Proof research, methodology and content library. This includes over 100 hours of online videos, exercises, and research from both my best-selling book and as an educator for business schools, boards and organizations from multinational corporations to metaverse startups.
What Do I Help You Avoid?
I help you avoid wasting your time on out of context, single-serving interventions that never leave the conference room and feel like they take time from the real work.
We never do work with knowing the context of what you are trying to achieve.
I help you, the leader, lead from a place of strength with, not over, the people you work with to create something you never thought possible.
How is My Approach Different?
We operate in an agile and entrepreneurial manner that allows you to get things done with speed and ingenuity.
We prioritize both the people involved and the task at hand, fostering cooperation and integrated actions.
With decades of executive experience, we understand the professionalism required for your work and the politics that might encumber bold visions and transformational change.
Our deep experience across Asia, Europe and the Americas gives us context to help solve problems and facilitate groups globally.
Our futures focus ensures that you are always “skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. We help you create a compass for a territory for which there is no roadmap.
What is Future Proof Not?
While we work with individual CEOs and founders on their leadership and future goals, we do not fundraise or broker any deals, which may lead to conflict of interest.
I do not coach junior staff 1:1. If you need support for your nextgen leaders we can great a wholistic program backed by our scalable education platform that is a great way to get people ready to lead and can be done in conjunction with whatever coach or coaching platform you use.
Testimonial
"Diana Wu David's expertise as an executive coach was instrumental in guiding our CEO for the Asia-Pacific region at the National Basketball Association. With a specific focus on new strategic developments and succession planning, Diana conducted comprehensive interviews with leaders across the global organization and the local team. Her insightful evaluations of individual and collective effectiveness provided us with valuable insights to analyze and achieve optimal results for our organization. Thanks to Diana's guidance, we were able to develop a new strategic plan that incorporates cutting-edge elements of web3 and other digital approaches. Additionally, we successfully identified the leadership required to drive these new initiatives forward."
- Gwen Lockington, HR Director, National Basketball Association, Asia-Pacific
Next Steps
If you’re interested in finding out how we might help future proof your organization, please get in touch at [email protected] or book some time in our calendar here.