Executive thinking, made relatable.
For organizations
Turnover, quiet disengagement, a bench with nobody on it — those start as feelings inside individual people and end up on your P&L. David Simmons spent 35+ years inside talent and culture at Marriott, DFS / LVMH, Mercy Health and Navitus Health Solutions. Book him for a keynote, or bring him inside for the longer work. This is what both look like.
Get hired. Stay hired. Get promoted.™
Frontline teams, emerging leaders, and the managers caught between them. Built for the people doing the work, bought by the people responsible for keeping them.
Your leaders are pulling in directions they each believe are the same one. Workshops and facilitated sessions that surface the gap and close it.
One person carrying more than the role was built for. Coaching for executives and the leaders you are betting the next five years on.
The room knows something is wrong and nobody has said it out loud. Speaking and facilitation that names it without blowing the place up.
Keynotes
Leadership, career clarity and workplace fulfillment — relatable, real, direct and unfiltered, for a conference, an all-hands or a leadership summit. These are the three he gives most.
Working hard and feeling fulfilled are not the same thing. David walks an audience through the Formula — what you love set against what you are good at — and the gap between internal purpose and the conditions people actually work in. Attendees leave able to name their own gap and do something about it on Monday.
Drawn from a hurricane relocation of 1,700 employees and a labor negotiation that avoided a strike. For leadership teams inside a turnaround, a restructure, or the slow work of rebuilding trust that has already been broken once.
Boardroom strategy translated into language a shift lead can act on. For organizations where the leadership vision is sound and it stops making sense somewhere between the top floor and the floor.
Also books as a workshop, a panel seat, or a recurring slot across a year. Tell him about the event →
Every engagement runs the Job Joy Fulfillment Framework™ (JJFF™) — the same three steps, whether it is one room for an hour or a leadership team across a quarter. You can stop after any step. Whatever is finished is yours.
Step one
Most teams cannot name the target, so every fix is a guess. This step puts it on paper: what the work is for, what people are good at, and where those two overlap. It is the Formula, applied to your organization rather than to one career.
You leave with a written target the room can say back in one sentence.
Step two
Disengagement is a symptom, not a diagnosis. The Five Joy Blocks — Identity, Alignment, Authority, Belonging, Trajectory — name which one is actually operating, because each takes a different repair and treating the wrong one costs you a year.
You leave with the blocks named, located by team, and ranked.
Step three
The Method: Name · Locate · Test · Remove. Small tests against real work rather than a culture initiative nobody remembers by March. The point is that it keeps running after the engagement ends.
You leave with the first tests run, and a method your managers can run without him in the room.
| Format | What it is | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote | One room, one hour. The argument, the story behind it, and something the audience can do on Monday. | Conferences, all-hands, leadership summits |
| Half day · 4 hours | Working session through Define and into Diagnose. | A single team or department |
| Full day · 8 hours | All three steps, with the Job Joy Assessment taken and read in the room. | Leadership groups and cross-functional teams |
| Two days · 12 hours | The full day plus career mapping for every person in the room. | Retention and succession work |
| Cohort | Facilitated sessions over several weeks with self-paced modules in between. | Rolling it out past one room |
| Coaching · 1:1 | Ongoing work with one executive or emerging leader. | A specific person you are investing in |
| Leadership team coaching | Succession and fulfillment mapping across a leadership bench. | Planning who comes next |
“Depends on the room and the length. Send me a note and I’ll give you a straight answer.”
David SimmonsThere is no rate card because a keynote for four hundred people and a quarter with eight executives are not the same purchase. Tell him the room, the length and what is going wrong, and he will come back with a number and what is in it.
If you would rather see the thinking first, the assessment and the framework are free and take four minutes.
A stage or a conference table, roughly how many people, and the thing you would fix first. That is enough to start.
Buying for yourself rather than an organization? Coaching, mentoring and cohort seats are priced openly at Work With David.
Work on it with David
Most people can tell you what is wrong with their work. Moving it is the part that goes faster with someone who has spent 35+ years on the other side of that conversation.
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Built by Ant Simmons
