David Apgar’s principal fields of expertise include lean planning techniques; operational risk management; and financial institution strategy. Lean planning – the subject of his book Relevance: Hitting Your Goals by Knowing What Matters (Jossey-Bass, 2008) – enables top executives to streamline dramatically their performance management efforts, sense change in their business environments, and cut noise out of their results. These techniques apply to non-profit organizations with complex objectives, government agencies, and private sector corporations.
His focus on risk management – like the subject of his book Risk Intelligence (Harvard Business School Press, 2006) – adds the capacity to evaluate risk evaluators to organizations’ arsenal of risk evaluation methods. The ability to evaluate risk competences is especially important to boards of directors. And his experience in bank M&A, bank supervision, and bank consulting at McKinsey give him a unique perspective on financial institution organization and strategy.

Apgar is the director for investment and risk strategy at BlueOrchard Finance, oldest of the for-profit microfinance funds, and a long-time managing director at the Corporate Executive Board, where he launched best practices research programs for corporate controllers and treasurers between 2001 and 2003. He joined the Board in 1998 from McKinsey, where he served insurance, reinsurance, and capital markets clients as a consultant and an engagement manager for three years.

Prior to that, he was responsible for numerous finance company, bank, and insurer mergers and acquisitions assignments as a vice president in Lehman Brothers’ Financial Institutions Group, and for building a framework for bank security sales as senior policy advisor to the Comptroller of the Currency. He proposed a debt relief program for Mexico and designed the precursor to interest rate relief Brady bonds as staff economist to Senator Bill Bradley.

Apgar holds an AB from Harvard, an MA from Oxford, and a PhD from the Rand Graduate School. He occasionally teaches risk management and international development at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies.