David Billis is currently Emeritus Reader at the London School of Economics (LSE) and was previously Visiting Professor at Imperial College. Before that he was at Brunel University where he worked with Elliot Jaques for 15 years. He is the author, co-author or editor of 7 books and some 250 publications including academic papers, monographs, conference papers and major reports. These works embrace two major research interests (a) the study of the nonprofit sector and (b) the development and implementation of the levels of work approach which he developed together with Ralph Rowbottom.

Whilst at Brunel he pioneered the study of nonprofit voluntary organisations and founded PORTVAC (Programme of Research and Training into Voluntary Action). This was the world's first university postgraduate programme for the nonprofit sector which he later transferred to the LSE where he became founding-Director of the Centre for Voluntary Organisation - a major research and post-graduate institute. He is the only non-American to be awarded the Lifetime Achievement award by ARNOVA, the leading American scholarly association in the field. He is co-founder and first International Editor of the journal Nonprofit Management and Leadership. He has also lectured at many universities around the world and has taught for the United Nations.

As an international consultant he has worked in 50 countries in 5 Continents and his experience covers the full range of organisations from multinationals and large governmental agencies to small voluntary and nonprofit organisations. The original levels of work approach expounded in Organisational Design (see later) was developed, extended and implemented by Billis in three leading multinationals including Unilever and Tesco. Together they employ about 600,000 people in some 100 countries. In all 3 companies the ideas were accepted at Board level. The work in Unilever probably represents one of the largest and most comprehensive H.R. "experiment" ever undertake.