David E. Potts Ph.D.

David Potts is founder and president of Tazewell Strategies (www.tazewellstrategies.com), focusing on government business development consulting, plus customer relations and sales training in Northern Virginia and the Washington DC metro area.

In his previous corporate position, David helped establish Lockheed Martin International, organized to coordinate global business operations. As its first staff director, he guided the stand up of headquarters facilities in Reston, Virginia and London.

For nearly a decade, David led Lockheed Martin corporate customer relations best practices and created and conducted the Customer Relations Institute at the corporation's Center for Leadership Excellence in Bethesda, Maryland. He also directed the Doing Business Overseas Institute and facilitated the Strategic Thinking for Executives Program together with Carnegie Mellon University.

Prior to his headquarters positions, David was an international senior director for business development with the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company in Fort Worth, Texas. In addition to work on the F-16 program for Poland, he also developed military airlift modernization programs for Romania and Bulgaria.

David is a retired Air Force colonel. He held a variety of operational and special duty assignments during decades of service. David served at two American embassies: Moscow in the 1980s as assistant air attaché and Prague in the 1990s as defense attaché.

He has a bachelor of fine arts degree in communications from Texas Christian University, a master of arts degree in public administration from the University of Northern Colorado, a master of arts degree in national security affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a doctorate of philosophy in Russian studies from Georgetown University.