David is the vice president of research at VitalSmarts, an innovative corporate training company that teaches skills which deliver significant improvements to the results companies care about most. In the past thirty years, the VitalSmarts team has helped thousands of organizations realize widespread and lasting results through its award-winning training programs.

At VitalSmarts, David has led a series of research projects on the role crucial conversations play in the healthcare industry and how they affect medical errors, employee retention, and patient satisfaction. David’s latest research project, called Silence Fails, explores how the ongoing failure rate within enterprise projects is consistently linked to the avoidance of a few key crucial conversations.

David is the coauthor of The New York Times bestseller Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. A respected academic, David has taught at Stanford University and the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University.