David Burnham is the President and Founder of Burnham Rosen Group, specializing in strategic business planning, organizational change, and leadership development. Burnham Rosen is distinguished from its competitors by its collaborative approach to business planning and its use of research and empirical data.

David, together with his former business partner and Harvard professor the late David C. McClelland, pioneered the field of competency assessment and development through the use of the behavioral event interview in the 1970’s. Their work in competency assessment was initially developed and conducted for a host of organizations including: the U.S. State Department; the United States Navy; the Department of Commerce, Office of Minority Business Enterprise; and the Manpower Career and Development Administration, City of New York. As competency assessment and development gradually became a validated and accepted set of tools and concepts, David Burnham extended the research and methodology to American industry as President and CEO of McBer and Company (now Hay Group), the preeminent behavioral science research firm of the time. The best-known output from that period is the Harvard Business Review article by McClelland and Burnham, Power Is The Great Motivator. The article reported on the competencies of successful American managers and created a wide-spread surge of interest and experimentation in the field of competency assessment and development. It won the Harvard Business Review’s McKinsey Award in 1976 and was republished in January 2003 as an HBR classic.

David continued to pursue his interest in leadership and leadership development and in the late 1980’s, he found that the competencies he and David McClelland had identified in the mid-1970’s as those distinguishing successful leaders from average leaders were no longer predicting superior business performance. Accordingly, in 1992, he initiated a five-year study in eight countries (in Europe, Asia, and the Americas) and thirteen industries. He followed leaders delivering first quartile business performance and high employee morale in their industries and then compared them to those delivering average performance.

This research defined which competencies would differentiate superior leadership for the next generation of business. It led to the creation of Burnham Rosen’s workshop to develop those competencies, InterActive Leadership™, and underlies Burnham Rosen Group’s executive coaching practice. The workshop has been offered internally at leading companies in a diverse industries, including: Fidelity Investments; BBDO; Lloyds; Pfizer; Accenture; Mitre Corp.; Morgan Stanley; State Street; Boston Financial; Convergent Technologies; Parexel; SunLife; Harvard University; GNER (UK); Atomic Weapons Establishment (UK); the Benedictine Order; and the British Cabinet Office.

David Burnham was also President and CEO of publicly-traded Intermedia Systems Corp. Intermedia, a producer of hardware and software for multi-media entertainment, was bankrupt when Burnham was hired to turn the Cambridge, MA-based firm around. Within one year, the firm had regained both revenue growth and profitability.

David Burnham holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was the Willard Prescott Smith Fellow. He has taught at a number of Universities and Management Institutes including: Adjunct Professor, Harvard Business School; University of Hawaii, East-West Center; University of South Florida; Australian Institute of Management; Barbados Institute of Management; Institute for Unternehmensfuhrung (Vienna); and Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY where he taught a graduate course in Management of High Technology Organizations for Northup Grumman leaders.