Dave Taketa has over 16 years experience working with multi-national companies on major business strategy, planning, and product/technology decisions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific, from focused multi-million dollar technical design trade-off projects to complex, multi-billion dollar corporate business strategy initiatives.

Dave began his career with a successful 20-year engineering technical track at General Motors Corporation. He excelled in many test, development & design engineering positions and ultimately held senior project manager positions in GM's advanced technology centers. During this long technical career, he had numerous assignments to restructure, re-energize, or sometimes disband outmoded departments. He led the implementation of new technologies and new business processes to create more efficient, effective engineering operations. Dave was deeply involved in GM's efforts to consolidate and re-structure multiple divisional product operations into a single global corporate vehicle development process.

In 2000, Dave was recognized with the distinction of 'GM Fellow' for his professional business strategy and decision analysis expertise. He was a Senior Advisor to GM management on major business strategy developments and large investment decisions worldwide; and was noted for his skill to confidentially listen to executive's issues or dilemmas, and to capture, analyze and synthesize their thoughts and ideas so they could make clearer, more confident decisions.

Dave spent 3 years in Germany on business strategy and planning turnaround initiatives at GM's European operations. He led the development of business and product strategies consistent with fulfilling the European Union environmental directives on CO2. He spent another year at GME's Zurich, Switzerland headquarters providing strategic project support to GME's BPO initiative to consolidate local HR operations from 10-countries to a single European central HR service center in Barcelona.

More recently, Dave supported environmental remediation projects and business process IT decision strategy initiatives at Chevron.

Dave holds a Master of Business Administration with a concentration in Organizational Behavior & Industrial Relations from the University of Michigan. He received his Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Engineering Physics from the University of Michigan.