David Allen (US)

Biographical Information
"David Allen is an author, consultant, international lecturer, founder and chairman of the David Allen Company. He is widely recognized as the world's leading authority on personal and organizational productivity. His thirty years of pioneering research, coaching and education of some of the world's highest-performing professionals, corporations and institutions, has earned him Forbes' recognition as one of the top five executive coaches in the United States. He was also named one of the "Top 100 thought leaders" by Leadership Magazine.

"Fast Company hailed David Allen "One of the world's most influential thinkers" in the arena of personal productivity, for his outstanding programs and writing on time and stress management, the power of aligned focus and vision, and his ground-breaking methodologies in management and executive peak performance.

"Time Magazine labeled his first book, Getting Things Done as "the defining self-help business book of its time." David Allen is the author of three books: The international bestseller, Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Ready For Anything, and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life. Getting Things Done has been a perennial business bestseller since it's publication in 2001, and is now published in 28 languages."

In the acknowledgments of Getting Things Done David thanks "J-R" for being his "spiritual coach."

"When Allen met him, John-Roger earned money by selling transcripts of the Mystical Traveler's teachings, known as Soul Awareness Discourses. But in 1977, as a general reaction against the more colorful elements of the counterculture set in, he explored new directions. With a devotee named Russell Bishop, John-Roger launched the Insight Seminars, a largely secular program that soon found its way into major US corporations." 

According to another article he met J-R in 1971. "On a morning in early May, the slight, silver-haired Allen stands in front of 160 men and women at Denver's Cherry Creek Marriott. Many are midlevel executives, and more than a few are system administrators and programmers at local tech firms. At $595 a head, Allen will take in about $93,000 for today's event; he should gross $1.7 million from the 18 public seminars he's scheduled to lead this year."...

"Fortunately for Allen, he didn't need empirical evidence: People felt better after taking his seminars. The Lockheed event was such a huge success that Michael Winston, the executive who brought Allen in, has asked him to lead seminars at nearly every company he has worked for since, including McDonnell Douglas, Motorola (Charts, Fortune 500), and Countrywide Financial (Charts, Fortune 500)...

"Meanwhile, Insight co-founder Russell Bishop began to form a division called Insight Consulting Group and then started a for-profit company called Productivity Development Group with Allen and Sally McGee, who later became Bishop's wife. During the next 12 years, the three refined the techniques Allen had developed, which they called managing accelerated productivity, or MAP, and branched out from the aerospace industry to pharmaceutical companies and Boston-area medical facilities.

"Guiding others to success, however, hardly made Allen himself immune to failure. He got burned during the 1990s after moving to Ojai with Kathryn, an Insight staffer he married in 1991 after his third divorce. Allen and PDG teamed up with a Boston entrepreneur named Tom Hagen, raised $12 million, and in 1994 launched a startup called Actioneer to create a software version of GTD."