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 twenty-five years 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.
His first book on professional businesses, Managing the Professional Service Firm, was published in 1993.
It was followed in 1997 by True Professionalism.
In 2000 he wrote The Trusted Advisor, with Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford.
In 2001 he published Practice What You Preach.
In 2002, he co-authored First Among Equals with Patrick McKenna.
In January 2008, he self-published his latest book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker based on a series of articles written during the previous year.
His books are currently available in English, Arabic, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Spanish, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Chinese.
A native of Great Britain, David holds degrees from the University of Birmingham, the London School of Economics and a doctorate from the Harvard Business School.
He began his teaching career at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and then joined the Harvard Business School faculty, where he taught courses in managing service businesses from 1979 until 1985.
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.
Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy