Alumni Profile: David Newkirk of University of Virginia's Darden School of Business

Today: CEO of Executive Education at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, where he is responsible for more than 100 senior executive education and leadership programs attended by some 3500 participants annually.

David Newkirk

The Darden School's Executive Education program has been ranked number one worldwide in its leadership training and the quality of its education. It was also recently ranked by BusinessWeek as number two in the United States and number four worldwide in its custom-designed programs for corporations. The program has long-standing relationships with many major corporations and works with their CEOs and senior executive teams to design tailored programs addressing critical issues such as globalization, mobilizing management around radical changes in strategy and direction, and organization dynamics.

David assumed his new position in September of 2005. His key challenges include:

• Keeping Darden on the leading edge of the executive education field



• Extending existing relationships with current clients and developing new links with the business community



• Continuing to introduce innovative educational practices into Darden's offerings



• Ensuring development and renewal of the faculty



• Achieving greater demonstrability and ROI for his client base



• Improving the manageability of the business aspects of the program

At Booz Allen & Before: After working for Booz Allen for four years in the early 1980s, David joined American Express. During his seven years there, he held a series of senior management positions, including vice president of strategic planning, general manager of Hong Kong, and senior vice president and regional head of Europe - Consumer & Financial Services. He rejoined Booz Allen and served as a London-based partner from 1991 through 2004 — his assignments took him all over world, from Tokyo to Sao Paulo, Abu Dhabi and Caracas.

During his tenure with the firm, David worked with leading consumer-oriented companies on a wide range of projects involving strategy, organization, marketing, and operations. He also held major managerial positions with the firm. In addition to leading Booz Allen's worldwide strategy practice and heading its European consumer practice, he served as the firm's first director of operations for Europe and as chairman of the firm's first Asia Board.

David has served as a member of the UK's Competition Commission, an independent director of the British Government's Energy Group Advisory Board, an Advisor to Qatar's Supreme Council on Information and Communications Technology, and as a member of the London Business School's Global Advisory Board. He is also non- executive Chairman of ESG Re, a specialty reinsurance company based in Bermuda. David received degrees in mathematics and philosophy from Carleton College and Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

Did your experience at Booz Allen help you build a foundation for your current position? Absolutely. It laid the groundwork in several ways: I understand the challenges of corporate transformation, both strategically and in terms of organizational change. I know how to talk to senior executives about their problems and the role that education could play in solving them. I know how to manage accounts: How to get close to a corporation and understand the issues it faces. I know how to handle the selling process.

And internally, I learned how to bring together diverse teams of individuals to solve a problem. Every time we put together a custom course, it's not unlike putting together a big consulting team and figuring out — what are the client's issues, how do I get the right skills and the right people working together in the right way in the right roles? This is also a utilization business. How do I balance teaching capacity and faculty requirements? All this feels a lot like running a consulting firm. And that feels natural to me.

What skills and strengths do you feel that you developed at Booz Allen? I won't repeat the obvious ones: analysis, communications, and problem solving. Beyond these, there are several that have served me particularly well. One is the ability to walk into a new setting and really understand the dynamics: what are the business problems, who are the individuals involved, what are their strengths and weaknesses, their concerns and their agendas?

The first 100 days here was like the first days at a new client. And the ability to read the setting and the environment is essential. There's nothing like watching a senior Booz Allen team walk into a client and really get a sense of what's going on. I had underestimated what a special skill that is. It's linked to an ability to communicate a vision and priorities very clearly — the ability to engage people on their own turf and talk to them in their own language about what you're trying to do. The ability to crystallize issues and focus on them effectively is really valuable when moving into a new setting. The essence of leadership is to have a vision — to know where you want to go and be able to communicate it to people and energize them behind it. I view this as core craft for a consultant.

The other thing that's surprisingly interesting is that Booz Allen has a very rigorous feedback process, which has been helpful to me. Having a pretty clear and candid sense of one's own strengths and weaknesses — and the ability to take both explicit and implicit feedback and to act on it — are useful as one tries to bring a team together. Part of what a team wants to do is to react to and influence its leader. So to walk in and say, I'm both able and willing to take feedback and respond to it, is a surprising differentiator in an academic setting.

Would you recommend working at Booz Allen and if so, why? I recruited hundreds of people for Booz Allen. The people for whom it's a good choice are those who are both capable of doing the work and motivated by it. Capability is pretty straightforward. Being motivated by the work is about an achievement orientation and the willingness to collaborate. For those kinds of people, I think it's great. For almost anyone interested in management, between two and five years at a consulting firm is wonderful training.

The choice to become a partner is much more about how you like to spend your time, what energizes you. So it becomes a very personal question. Up to the principal level, you're learning very fungible skills: how to analyze, to communicate, to lead teams, to structure work, and to identify issues. It's a post-graduate degree in management. As a principal, you really have to learn the consulting business. You have to learn how to sell, how to develop and merchandize ideas, and how to build the team that's going to give you leverage. So from principal to lead partner, what you're learning is absolutely critical to building a consulting career, but it's less immediately valuable in a corporate setting.

Consulting is about ideas and people in a way that corporate management is not. It's refreshingly collaborative and collegial. The one caution I would give is that organizational leadership involves specific skills that are most easily learned by practice. I couldn't do the job I'm doing now if I hadn't spent time at American Express and if I hadn't taken internal managerial roles at Booz Allen.

I often said that Booz Allen is a part of a lot of good careers. Depending on where you want to go, you need to make sure as well that you collect the skills and experiences that aren't going to come immediately or easily at Booz Allen. In particular, we tend to underrate the degree to which leadership is a practical skill that has to be learned. If your long term goal is to be a leader of an institution, you need to make sure that in your day job or your outside interests, you're getting the leadership experiences you will need. While there are ways to be a leader as a consultant, you don't have to be a leader to be a good consultant.

Any favorite moments or experiences at Booz Allen? Oh there are lots of them. All the stories I have are about people. There's a real pleasure in the continuity of seeing the same people again and again over 25 years. Unlike business, your relationships are tighter because you're dealing with real problems together again and again.

I worked with a team in the Middle East to develop a tourism strategy. I remember a conversation that I had with the client about tourism — I had always viewed tourism as a way to exchange low-cost labor for hard currency — but the client saw tourism as a way to force the modernization of his society and government processes. A robust tourism economy requires entrepreneurship and by developing tourism, he hoped to develop his country. That was a great moment.

Any advice for people just launching their careers with the firm? Booz Allen always has had two elements at the heart of its culture. The first is owning the client's agenda and mission. You need to absolutely lose yourself in the client's problem. The clients love it and it's the only way to guarantee quality. Second, Booz Allen has a culture of achievement. So while you want to lose yourself in the client's problems, you need to set your own standards, which are inevitably higher than your client's. Ultimately, Booz Allen delivers quality work not because we try to satisfy clients, but because we try to satisfy ourselves. Satisfying yourself without owning the client's agenda becomes dangerous. But if you do own the clients agenda, pleasing yourself and surprising your colleagues lets you deliver really great work because we will challenge ourselves more than our clients will challenge us.

I had a corporate career, a consulting career, and I now am starting my third act, in the public domain. One of the pieces of advice I give is that over the long term it's one's hobbies and outside interests that lay the groundwork for a third act. Each of us needs to develop other interests for a lot of reasons. First, we need be human beings. Second, to a large degree, the leadership skills and judgment that one needs to be a senior consultant are most easily developed outside the consulting domain.

Outside boards, voluntary or commercial give perspectives about how business decisions are made and about the fundamental conflicts that senior executives face that you just can't get any other way. I don't think you sell much work to your social network. But you do learn from your peers. And social networking is valuable because it teaches you how other people think. Particularly as your peers move into senior positions, they're frequently the easiest ones from whom to gain a sense of perspective. The value for me in having senior executives as friends is not that I made them my clients, but that they helped me understand how professionals and leaders thought — and this gave me confidence to engage my clients as a peer.

profile posted January 30, 2006