Working with CEOs and senior leaders to navigate complex challenges, drive innovation and achieve a bold vision for the future.

A Little About Our Founder

Diana Wu David is a former Financial Times executive with 30 years of corporate multinational and venture-backed start-up P&L experience. She and our 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. Her 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.

And this?

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” but 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 chasing incremental wins and 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. 

Future Proofing Your Business, Teams and Leadership...

1. Creates clarity for your business by reviewing and prioritizing future possibilities and creating a clear vision with your team.  

2. Aligns 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. Unlocks 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.


Case Study

Competitive Advantage Through Education

  • ChallengeHashkey Digital Asset Group needed to establish itself as a trusted leader in digital asset management.
  • Approach: Launched Hashkey Academy to educate clients, staff and stakeholders and increase sales and CEOs productivity.
  • Impact: This strengthened Hashkey's reputation and positioned it for future growth, including licensing from the Securities and Futures Commission.
  • "This was new territory for our company. Diana worked seamlessly from our CEO to younger staff she trained along the way. One of the most accomplished project managers I've ever met."
    - Walter Jennings, Head of Corp Communications

What Can You Expect to Gain from Working with Future Proof? 

You and your team will have a process & method to help surface and act upon shared future goals. You will be equipped with tools and practices suited to today’s complex and interconnected challenges and be able to think broadly about how macro forces shaping society will impact the business landscape.

You will be better at articulating what the future looks like, feels like, tastes like and everyone’s role in that shared vision and empower people to surface bold, new ideas. 

You will have deliberate practices to upgrade your or your team’s leadership and collaboration. People are enrolled, engaged and organized in a way that supports their best work and a sustainable people strategy.

You have more opportunity for positive impact as a leader in the organization and for the organization as a whole.

NBA

Case Study

Pivoting to Web3

  • Challenge: Covid caused a massive disruption for both in-person games and youth outreach designed to inspire new consumers and employees.
  • Approach: Diana coached CEO with goal to lead the launch of a new strategic vision & 5 year plan presented to HQ that incorporated web3/emerging technology to seize new revenue opportunities.
  • Impact: Additional resources and headcount granted to pursue the new vision. Ongoing futures thinking capacity inculcated via monthly meetings to scout for signals that could be applied to the business.
  • "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, APAC

How Do We Work with You? 

From consulting to coaching to boards, the goal is to create business breakthroughs.

We view you as a business partner who will co-create solutions and programmes to support your goals. 

1. Consulting engagements run 6-12 months, once we have aligned on key goals, milestones, team responsibilities and stakeholders. Depending on the assignment work may include initial stakeholder or customer interviews / focus groups, or review of previous plans, surveys or benchmarks from outside organizations. 

2. Coaching engagements such as 1:1 C-suite, senior leadership or team coaching generally run 6-12 months and may include interviewing key stakeholders and review of past assessments or performance.  

Both consulting and coaching may 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.

3. Board evaluations and advisory cover from a few months (basic board evaluation) to several years if there is ongoing work to be done to improve board effectiveness in service of business results.

What is Special About Future Proof Lab?

Our work is fuelled 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. Our practitioners have decades of experience, hail from the heads of organizations and are united by a desire to create inspiring futures for the businesses with whom we work.

What Do We Help You Avoid?

We 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 without knowing the context of what you are trying to achieve.

We believe in leading from a place of strength with, not over, the people you work with to create something you never thought possible.

How is Our 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.

Case Study

Co-Creating Solutions for Future of Work

  • Challenge: How to create solutions for future of work challenges across sustainability, inequality, digital literacy and trust drawing upon the smartest young minds in the region.
  • Approach: A virtual 8-day workshop brought together 61 young leaders who learned strategic foresight and used Mural to co-create real world policy recommendations and business ideas then pitched to a regional panel of business executives, ambassadors and thought leaders.
  • Impact: The winning team designed a platform to promote skills development in the region. Selected leaders continue to use the network for further collaboration and to use their learnings in their work.
  • “This is one of the best training programs I’ve been part of either virtually or in person, not only because of the well-planned material, but also because of the people...” - Maral Dipodiputro (Participant, Indonesia)

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. 

We rarely 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 you future proof your organization, from workshops or strategic offsites to larger-scale programmes, please get in touch at [email protected] or book some time in the calendar here.