David Hurst is a reflective business practitioner with a unique niche in the management field. As a speaker, he presents highly innovative ideas through the application of systems thinking to his own experience and that of others, dealing with a wide range of business and organizational issues, especially strategy, leadership and change. As a consultant, he specializes in the implementation of change initiatives, often through the design and delivery of customized development programmes. As a writer, in his first groundbreaking book, Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change (Harvard Business School Press, 1995/2002), he used concepts from ecology and anthropology to explain how organizations are born, evolve and decline. He shows why they are often renewed only through crisis. In his recent book Learning from the Links: Mastering Management Using Lessons from Golf (The Free Press, 2002) he used the theory of complex systems to discipline the comparison between golf and management and to generate unique insights into the nature of learning and change.

He has published articles in leading business publications such the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Strategy+Business, Organizational Dynamics, among others. David spent more than 25 years as a senior operating manager in a number of diversified companies, including 10 years as executive vice president of the Federal Industries Metals Group, where he was part of a senior management team that saved the organization from bankruptcy. He is a Research Fellow at the Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina.