David Gurteen is a keynote speaker and conversational facilitator.
He works in the fields of knowledge management, organizational learning, and conversational leadership. He gives keynote talks, designs and facilitates Knowledge Cafés and runs workshops around the world.
He is best known as the creator of the Gurteen Knowledge Café – a versatile conversational process to bring a group of people together to learn from each other, share experiences and make better sense a rapidly changing, complex, less predictable world in order to improve decision making and to innovate.
The focus of his current research, writing, and teaching is Conversational Leadership.
Conversational Leadership is about appreciating the extraordinary but underutilized power of conversation, recognizing that we can all lead, and adopting a conversational approach to the way in which we live and work together.
He has facilitated hundreds of Knowledge Cafés and workshops in over 30 countries around the world over the last 13 years.
He is the founder of the Gurteen Knowledge Community – a global network of over 22,000 people in over 160 countries and he published his regular monthly Knowledge-Letter that is now in its 16th year.
David curates the Gurteen Knowledge website GURTEEN.COM – a resource site that contains book reviews, articles, people profiles, event calendars, inspirational quotations, an integral blog and much more on subjects that include knowledge management, informal learning, creativity and innovation.
He is an avid networker and user of social tools. He is connected to over 9,000 people on LinkedIn and has over 10,000 followers on Twitter. He tweets most days. He also facilitates a LinkedIn discussion forum for his community that has almost 5,000 members.
He is the editor of the book Leading Issues in Social Knowledge Management published by Academic Publishing International and in June 2010, David won the Ark Group’s lifetime achievement award for services to Knowledge Management.
He is currently writing an online book (a blook) on Conversational Leadership.
He has a degree in Physics and started his career as a computer-aided design engineer working for British Aerospace. He moved on later to work as a software development manager for Prime Computer where he designed and implemented early networking and file sharing systems. From there he moved to Lotus Development where as European Software Development Manager he managed the localization of Lotus 1-2-3 (an early spreadsheet application) into various languages.
His corporate career culminated in the position as International Czar for Lotus Development in Cambridge Massachusetts where he was responsible for ensuring that all software products were designed for the International marketplace. In 1993, he left Lotus to become an independent consultant, speaker and facilitator.
