David Muhlmann

David advises executives in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East as they seek to drive business strategy into their organizations and foster performance-boosting behaviors. As an expert practitioner in McKinsey’s talent work within the People & Organizational Performance Practice, he helps companies make the most of their human resources as business needs evolve and expand.

David has nearly 20 years of experience in organizational dynamics and executive coaching. He guides projects for clients focused on establishing innovative talent-management solutions, especially in workforce planning, performance management, organizational change, leadership, and development. Strongly grounded in research-based best practices, David draws on people analytics to facilitate talent decisions.

Examples of his recent client work include the following:

• redesigning the go-to-market organization for a major pharmaceutical company to achieve growth, enhance productivity, and support a digitalization effort for sales activities
• establishing a new human-capital approach, including agile employee journeys, for a leading mining company to support a shift from a B2B to a B2C business model while pursuing business internationalization
• designing the talent strategy for an aerospace company to enhance leadership capabilities, with tasks that included establishing a new career path system to enhance international management experience
• David is a professional coach and psychoanalyst practitioner. He started his consulting career at a multinational technology company. He then served at other consultancies, where he managed projects focused on organizational effectiveness. Much of his work was in the energy sector, with projects in Algeria, Angola, Kuwait, and Norway. He deepened his focus on organizational and HR issues at a global management-consulting firm by advising on the design of strategic workforce-planning programs.

With a doctorate in organizational sociology, David continues to expand his understanding of management science as a research fellow at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations in Paris and as a professor of labor psychology and occupational work at Sciences Po. He has authored four books on psychology and sociology. He speaks English and French.