David Cooperrider

David Cooperrider (born July 14, 1954) grew up in Oak Park Illinois, and is the Fairmount Minerals Chair and Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and Faculty Director at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case. He also teaches at University of Pennsylvania as well as Claremont University, where he was named The Peter F. Drucker Distinguished Fellow, one of the highest honors in the field of management for his contributions to leadership, change management, and organization development.

Cooperrider is internationally recognized as the founder, together with Suresh Srivastva, of the theory of Appreciative Inquiry. David’s original doctoral dissertation Appreciative Inquiry Into Organizational Life has been cited in numerous books as “the first, and as yet, the best articulation of the theory and vision of appreciative inquiry.” It was completed and defended in 1985.

According to Ode, "In the field of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, David leads the movement towards a more sustainable future, as manifested in many international forums and gatherings, such as the Global Forum 'Business as an Agent of World Benefit: Management Knowledge Leading Positive Change'".

Appreciative Inquiry was articulated first as a method for building generative theory. It was a call for “a scholarship of the positive,” focusing our attention on “what gives life” to human and ecological systems when they are most alive. Very quickly – beyond its use as a positive organizational scholarship and theory-building method – the applied power of appreciative inquiry was discovered, and soon it spread to many domains such as organization development, strengths-based management, applied positive psychology, evaluation studies, change management, coaching and counseling, corporate strategy, sustainable development, social constructionism, design thinking, biomimicry, and learning theory.

In a New York Times best-selling book, Marcus Buckingham traced it and concluded that the theory of Appreciative Inquiry was one of the three most important academic catalysts for the strengths revolution in management. Beyond the seminal work of Cooperrider and Srivastva, the other two giant sources of the strengths revolution in management included Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive and Martin Seligman’s call for a Positive Psychology in 2000. Together, appreciative inquiry, Drucker’s management theory, and positive psychology have created a society-wide positive-strengths movement “because it works.”

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