David Hurst

David Hurst is a speaker, consultant and writer on management. As a reflective practitioner he has a unique niche in the field. He spent twenty-five years working in the corporate world as an effective manager and extracted from his experience some highly innovative ideas about leadership, the management of change and the dynamics of organizations that promote creativity and learning. Hurst communicates these ideas to audiences around the world in the form of creative presentations, in-depth seminars and articles that have been published in leading business publications such as the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Strategy+Business, Globe and Mail, Strategic Management Journal, Organizational Dynamics, Academy of Management Executive, Business Quarterly, and Organization Science.

For ten years, Hurst was Executive Vice-President of a large North American industrial distributor. With sales of over CDN $1 Billion, the company employed 1600 people. Here, in addition to his operational line responsibilities, he handled the Group's Management Development and Management Information Services. He began his career in retail distribution, but soon became involved in mergers, acquisitions and business turnarounds, particularly in the steel industry. Hurst was appointed Executive Vice-President in 1982 during a tumultuous period when he, as part of a senior management team, saved the organization from bankruptcy during a severe business recession.

Hurst's first book, Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in 1995 and was reprinted in paperback in 2002. His second book, Learning from the Links: Mastering Management Using Lessons From Golf, broke new ground in understanding what it takes to create excellence through practice. His third book, The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World, is an extraordinary integration of management thought and practice from a systems perspective. Published by Columbia University Press, its objective is to help readers make meaning from their own management experience and education and thus to improve their practical judgment and wisdom, to ask better questions of reality and tell more compelling stories about it. The result is an inspirational synthesis of management thought and practice that will resonate with every reader's experience.

Hurst holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a BA (Psychology) from the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Regina's Kenneth Levene Graduate School of Business and Adjunct Faculty with the Center for Creative Leadership. He is also a Contributing Editor to Strategy+Business.

David K. Hurst's Blog Posts:

Halftime in America: The Power of Story

• 1. The New Ecology of Leadership

  David Hurst's book, The New Ecology of Leadership, is an extraordinary integration of management thought and practice that has profound implications for business leadership and strategy. Throughout it, Hurst adopts a systems perspective, using analogies drawn from nature to illustrate his ideas and their practical application. David's objective for both the book and its related presentations is to help readers and audiences make meaning from their own management experience and education and thus to improve their practical judgment and wisdom, to ask better questions of reality and tell more compelling stories about it. His approach takes an expansive view of organizations by connecting their development to humankind's evolutionary heritage and cultural history. He locates the origins of organizations in communities of trust and follow their development through the application of logic and their maturation in power. Crucially, Hurst also tracks the decline of powerful organizations as they age and show how their strengths become weaknesses in changing circumstances. His core argument is that the human mind is not rational in a logical sense but in an ecological way. In other words, it has evolved to extract cues to action from the specific situations in which it finds itself. Thus contexts matter, and Hurst shows how passion, reason, and power, deployed as tools and embedded in settings, can be used to change and sustain organizations, both for good and for ill. The result is an inspirational synthesis of management theory and practice that will resonate with everyone's experience.

• Courageous Leadership

  There is growing evidence that human organizations, like many complex living systems, require ongoing challenges if they are continually to renew themselves. This presentation looks at the role that leaders must play in this process of creative destruction. For it is not enough for managers merely to "shake-up" their organizations and then stand outside the process. The defining characteristic of all effective leaders is to be "one of us," to be seen to share a common fate with their followers. It is the heart of what we mean by integrity – for the only purpose that can redeem the process is the renewal of the total system.

• 9. Hunters and Herders: The Challenge of Organizational Renewal

  The nomadic hunting/foraging band, self-organizing and resilient, was mankind's original learning organization and an understanding of their dynamics is directly relevant to organizational issues today. In this presentation, the hunter's egalitarian mode of life is contrasted with that of the herders and their hierarchical structure. The social dynamics and physical contexts which compel hunters to become herders are shown to exist within our modern organizations. The best illustration is that of the venture capital firm, Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers in Silicon Valley, who use hunting techniques to 'manage their luck.' This leads participants to a new understanding of the requirements for organizational renewal and the difficulties they may encounter on the way.

• 8. Boxes and Bubbles: the Management of Change

  Based upon my best-selling Harvard Business Review article, this presentation covers the experiences of the management team of a fast growing, acquisition-oriented conglomerate who were themselves taken over in a wildly over-leveraged buyout on the eve of a serious business recession. The presentation deals with management's reactions to the bewildering world in which they found themselves and how they changed their concepts and their practices to successfully handle the turbulence. The lessons drawn have wide application to all kinds of organizations undergoing rapid, discontinuous change.

• 7. Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change

  This presentation presents a radical view of how all successful organizations evolve and renew themselves, and what managers need to do to lead the revival. It argues that there are often times when managers must create deliberate crises in acts of "ethical anarchy" in order to break the constraints of success. Organizational renewal involves going back to the founding principles of an organization to reconnect the past with the present and restore the excitement and emotional commitment that are often missing from large enterprises. It is the integration of these renewal activities with conventional management practices that allows managers to lead their organizations to new life.

• 6. How Leaders Learn

  What and how do leaders learn? The evidence is clear. Leadership is a cluster of skills that is learned through special kinds of experience not lectures in classrooms! The skills themselves are complex bundles of perceptions and actions that cannot be learned in abstract. In the workplace the key factors seem to be challenging work assignments, significant bosses and hardships. But what are the fundamental processes and can they be duplicated in development programs? The answer is that they can, but the conditions are demanding. New competencies come only from new sensitivities developed through timely, specific feedback. And creating the commitment and discipline to achieve mastery requires contexts that are often difficult to duplicate.

• 5. Beyond the Quick Fix

  Many management initiatives, like 'quick fixes' in golf, deal with the symptoms of problems without getting to their underlying causes. This is understandable given the intricacies of cause-and-effect in all complex systems, but the unfortunate outcome is often a series of better-before-worse activities. The only way to improve the performance of a complex system in a sustainable way is to fix problems at their source and reduce the solutions to organizational habits that don't require conscious intervention. But this is easier said than done. The worst culprit in most organizations is the annual budgeting process, which compels managers to commit to financial results without necessarily understanding their causal basis. The consequence is often lip service, with the production of financial results that are not only unsustainable, but are often accompanied by outright manipulation, if not falsification. This presentation shows managers how to 'scale' their strategies so that the webs of cause-and-effect are uncovered and made meaningful to all those who must participate in their realization.

• 4. Learning from the Links: Mastering Management Using Lessons from Golf

  Management was, is, and always will be about getting things done. Yet while today the challenge of implementation remains central, we hardly understand the issue at all. Our pervasive "think-then-act" model of the mind does not match the way in which effective people and successful organizations actually work. The implementation of strategy is no different systemically from an athlete performing a complex action. Conscious intentions formed in the brain have to be transformed into unconscious competencies performed by the body. We know the world through our bodies, yet their role is much neglected in management thought. As these presentations make clear, body movement is a resource to the mind and none makes a better resource than the game of golf. Golf instructs us not through concepts, but through structured experience. It teaches us to think strategically about the complex webs of cause-and-effect that lie between thought and action. Golf reminds us of the importance of execution and the danger of letting one's plans diverge too far from one's abilities. Golf also inculcates values for living – those common courtesies and sensitivities that underpin all effective groups, from families to teams to companies. Lastly, golf teaches us to live in the present, to stay in the moment, the only place and time where success and happiness can be found.

• 3. The Creative Organization: The Ecodynamics of Leadership and Creativity

  Why are so many organizations innovative and creative when they begin their lives but become hidebound and conservative as they age? This presentation uses a novel conception of the creative process derived from looking at organizations as natural systems. In the numerous modules that make up this presentation, the 'ecodynamics' of leadership and creativity become clear. It shows clearly how successful firms can become 'scale-bound' as they grow – operating at progressively higher levels of abstraction. Their processes can work well for some time provided the environment does not change! When it does they may find themselves in territories for which they have no strategic maps and facing risks of which they are unaware. Now they have to 'rescale' their organizations, getting back to their innovative roots to find the processes of learning and creativity that they can use to renew themselves. Suggestions are made as to how creative tension can be reintroduced into organizations that have lost their ability to learn. The objective is to create small communities of practice, who can immerse themselves in experimentation at the edges of the organization.

• 2. Crisis & Renewal: Finding Opportunity in Adversity

  No one likes crisis, but despite our wishes to the contrary the course of civilization's progress is neither smooth nor sure. To a considerable and largely unacknowledged extent society and its component organizations advance strategically by accident, economically by windfall and politically by disaster. Armies are reformed only after defeats; safety regulations are introduced after accidents; and firms only change strategies after significant reversals. On the other side of the balance, blockbuster products seem to emerge from nowhere and companies you have never heard of ride trends to fame and fortune. This isn't just chance. It seems that human organizations don't change when they want to; they change when they have to, when they feel compelled to change. At the personal level this thought is captured in the old adage that "People don't change when they see the light; they change when they feel the heat." This presentation which can be customized to fit any organization's situation examines why crisis is such a powerful catalyst for change and how you can harness its power in your organization with practical actions. Economic meltdowns create opportunities for change and it helps if you can find the opportunities in adversity.

• David Hurst is my favourite corporate conceptualizer, a renaissance man of Canadian business.
• The insight you provided to community, government and industry leaders was highly relevant and germane to the forest industry's current and long-term challenges. We appreciated both the candid style of delivery and the well-researched content of your presentation.
  Interior Lumber Manufacturers' Association
• A real highlight both intellectually challenging and highly practical. Bravo!
  Management Centre Europe (International H.R. Management Conference)

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  May 2012

  The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World

  This book is both for general readers unfamiliar with sophisticated management concepts and for active practitioners seeking to advance their management and leadership skills. The author's objective is to help readers make meaning from their own management experience and education and thus improve their practical judgment and wisdom - to ask better questions of reality and tell more compelling stories about it. His approach takes an expansive view of organizations by connecting their development to humankind's evolutionary heritage and cultural history. It locates the origins of organizations in communities of trust and follows their development through the application of logic and their maturation in power. It also crucially tracks the decline of organizations as they age and shows how their strengths become weaknesses in changing circumstances.

  
  
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  September 2007

  Learning From The Links: Mastering Management Using Lessons From Golf

  Hurst takes to task the current "head-down" instructional model used to teach golf and management. He addresses the huge gulf between knowing what to do in a given situation and knowing how to do it. This chasm is an ever-present hazard both on the course and in an organization: it keeps people from solving their problems and achieving their goals. By examining golfers'' and managers'' struggles for improvement, Hurst shows us why complex systems are so hard to change and how to set about changing them -- systematically.

  
  
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  September 2002

  Crisis & Renewal: The History of a Great Railroad

  Hurst develops a model of change -- the organizational ecocycle -- to explain how even successful organizations become systematically vulnerable to catastrophe. He brings the model to life with stories of crisis and renewal from both his own management and consulting experiences and a cross-section of enterprises -- from the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari and the Quakers of the Industrial Revolution to contemporary organizations such as 3M and Nike.

  
  

The Creative Organization and the Architecture of Choice