AICDP is delighted to announce the appointment of David Cousin MA (Leadership Studies) Exeter, as Dean of the AICDP Business School. He brings a wealth of life, people, management and leadership experience to the role.
Starting his career in IT Operations at Shell, David moved to Mobil in Computer Operations and Programming, then spent 12 years at Whitbread, initially as their Data Centres Manager then as Technical Services Manager.
In the leading role of Customer and Technical Services Manager at Railtrack Information Systems, he planned and renewed their entire hardware and software systems, while maintaining a high-level IT service to a busy, complex organisation. He initiated comprehensive cultural change in IT accompanied by an extremely successful, internal IT behavioural customer service programme.
As Lead Consultant at Compass, an international consultancy, he delivered engagements in IT customer relationship improvement, contract management and performance benchmarking in Australia, Sweden, Korea, North America, Ireland and the UK.
In addition to becoming Dean of the AICDP Business School, David has been working as a coach and facilitator with Dropping the Pilot. In his spare time (!) David enjoys beer, his grand-children and writing poetry (not always in the same order). His retirement to a Greek island is endlessly delayed.He has had a practical and theoretical interest in Leadership for many years, working frequently with The Industrial Society on their Runge Effective Leadership Programmes at Balliol College, Oxford.
While living and working in Australia for Compass, he completed an MA in Leadership Studies at Exeter University. He claims he began this mainly to learn how to lead distributed teams of up to 240 people, though this was five years beyond the time when that was one of his responsibilities.
As Dean of the Business School, David will ensure that everything delivered is of the highest quality and of practical relevance to Credit Professionals.
David commented ‘Leadership is a contact sport, moving and dynamic. There is no certainty in leadership, there is only exploration, risk, discovery . . . and the accumulation of experience. Working with the AICDP Business School, we will support people in learning from all the experience available: theirs, ours and whatever else is out there.’