Diana Wu David wants to redefine what it means to lead in an age when nothing stands still. A former assistant to Dr. Henry Kissinger and senior executive at the Financial Times, she’s traded suits and titles for something far more urgent: helping today’s leaders prepare for a world shaped by AI, demographic upheaval, and unrelenting acceleration.
At the helm of Future Proof Lab, Diana serves as a strategist, coach, and provocateur to Fortune 500 executives, policymakers, and global institutions. She does more than future-proof companies—she equips people to lead with foresight, flexibility, and purpose in a world where yesterday’s playbook no longer applies.
Diana has spent more than 30 years crossing sectors and continents—from PwC to JPMorgan to the World Bank—distilling patterns of change and resilience. Her book Future Proof: Reinventing Work in the Age of Acceleration, named a Top 10 Innovation Book by Inc. magazine, reads less like a manual and more like a manifesto for those determined to stay human in the age of machines. Her writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Nikkei, where she explores how AI, Web3, and longevity will reshape how we live and work.
But Diana is no alarmist. She is a determined optimist. A systems thinker who believes that the best leadership is not reactive—it is regenerative. “We need to be determined optimists about the future,” she says, “seeing challenges as opportunities to create meaningful change.”
Educated at Columbia Business School, where she now teaches, and serving as an adjunct professor at the University of Hong Kong, Diana moves easily between boardrooms and classrooms. She’s also a FORWARD Fellow at RMIT University and has been recognized as the #2 futurist in the world by Global Gurus and a Top 50 Future of Work Influencer by Onalytica.
Her clients don’t hire her for answers. They bring her in when the questions get existential: What is the future of leadership when intelligence is no longer only human? What happens to trust when algorithms manage decisions? How do we prepare for a world we can’t predict?
In the face of these uncertainties, Diana remains focused on one thing: ensuring that leadership keeps pace with technology—and never loses sight of the human.
©Prophets of AI
