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DAVID MAISTER
ONE OF THE WORLD’S LEADING AUTHORITIES ON THE MANAGEMENT OF PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS.
David Maister is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authorities on the management of professional service firms.
In 2002, he was identified as one of the top 40 business thinkers in the world (BUSINESS MINDS, Financial Times/Prentice Hall.)
For two decades he has advised firms in a broad spectrum of professions, covering all strategic and managerial issues, building a global practice that finds him spending about 40% of his time in North America, 30% in western Europe, and 30% in the rest of the world.
It was while a young faculty member at the Harvard Business School in the early 1980s that Maister started focusing on the previously unexplored territory of professional service firms.
Says Maister, “Most professional service firms have nothing to sell but their people. There are no machines to bail you out of trouble and keep up production. So, whether you’re talking about serving customers and clients, or attracting and retaining employees, you end up having to figure out what makes people tick. Which is hard, because few of us are ever taught these things.” He found that trying to manage the exceedingly independent, creative individuals, who make up any professional service firm, was a particularly difficult challenge.
His ability to convince these clients of the urgent need for them to grapple with issues like standards, commitment and career frequently elicits “Ah Ha” moments of enlightenment. Maister’s approach is highly personal. He frequently outlines dilemmas he faces in his own life (to lose weight or to stop smoking: “You know you need to do it, but it’s hard to find the self-discipline”) to illustrate why new ways of thinking are consistently being put off or sabotaged. “Clients know more and understand more than they ever actually put into practice,” he says.
His first book on the professions, Managing the Professional Service Firm, published in 1993, collected many of his best articles. It was followed in 1997 by True Professionalism, and in 2000 by The Trusted Advisor, written with Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford. In 2001 he published Practice What You Preach and in 2002, First Among Equals, co-authored with Patrick McKenna.
His books are currently available in English, Arabic, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Spanish, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Chinese (Taiwanese and Mainland.).
A native of Great Britain, Maister holds degrees from the University of Birmingham, the London School of Economics and a doctorate in Business Administration from the Harvard Business School. He began his teaching career at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and then joined the Harvard faculty, where he taught courses in managing service businesses and managing production operations from 1979-85. During that period he published seven books on academic business topics such as managing trucking and airline companies, factory operations, and architectural firms.
Maister lives in Boston with his wife and coach, Kathy. He is an avid collector of popular music, and owns more than 15,000 CD’s and a rapidly growing number of DVDs.
In March of 2005, he finally took his own advice, gave up smoking and lost 30 pounds.
