Michael Treacy

Growth & Innovation Expert, Business Strategist, Entrepreneur & Bestselling Author

Michael Treacy

Growth & Innovation Expert, Business Strategist, Entrepreneur & Bestselling Author

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Biography

Michael Treacy is the President and founder of Treacy & Company. He brings over 30 years of experience helping companies achieve market leadership. Treacy’s ideas about customer value propositions and growth disciplines have been used by companies across the globe to reshape strategies, bolster competitive positions and dramatically improve top and bottom line performances.

Treacy's views have been shaped by his rich experiences as an academic at MIT, as an advisor to some of the most successful firms of the past decade, and as an entrepreneur who has established and led several successful firms. In his career he’s encountered and surmounted almost every obstacle to achieving exceptional company performance and building extraordinary firms.

Treacy’s books have gained international attention. In the 1990s, he showed how to gain a competitive advantage through value leadership in The Discipline of Market Leaders a New York Times bestseller. It outlines the principles of leadership in a competitive marketplace – focused on an unmatched customer value proposition delivered through a unique operating model design. Many companies large and small have adopted these principles to drive their own business strategies and build competitive advantage. A decade later in Double Digit Growth, a Business Week bestseller, he proved how rapid, steady and profitable growth can be dialed up on purpose.

Now, Treacy’s radically different thinking is again leading the way - helping leaders assess the global opportunity and face an unprecedented globalizing marketplace that brings with it an assault by upstart competitors who are smart, motivated and who take the long view.

With the size of the middle-class is about to triple worldwide due to increasing standards of living across the globe, they represent the opportunity of a lifetime. Companies that lean into the future and focus will dominate and increase scale, scope and power. Those who don’t are at risk. Michael Treacy’s clear strategies help leaders in businesses large and small - showing leaders how to look at competition, customers, people, finance and markets in a new way and laying out the pathways for global growth and market leadership.

Michael Treacy also follows his own advice; the venturing arm of his consulting and research firm, Treacy & Company, applies his strategies to its portfolio of seven fast-growing companies with extraordinary results. Each year they fund and launch at least one new start-up that has the prospect of being a game-changer in the markets they target.

A former professor of management at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Treacy has published numerous articles over the past two decades in magazines and journals and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. He is also currently engaged in a major research study to understand the performance discipline that allows certain companies to routinely achieve high performance – in growth, cost control, safety, or other important goals – while other firms struggle with uncertain results.

Treacy received his PhD. from MIT and his engineering degree from the University of Toronto. He has served as a board member for several leveraged buyouts and new ventures. He currently resides in Needham, Massachusetts with his wife and three children.

Speaker Videos

Four Pathways To Global Growth

New Competitors: The Upstart Challenge

Technology and Innovation in the Marketplace

Leading Growth-Obsessed Organizations

On his Startups - Lessons Learned

Where Do Customers Fit In

Where is the Global Growth

Where Do Policy Makers Need to Know

Localized Innovation for Global Markets

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Speech Topics

Growth – No Matter What

Over the past two decades, most organizations have mastered how to improve quality, cut costs, accelerate product development and strengthen value to the marketplace. But for many, growth remains a game of chance, determined as much by outside forces as by skill or discipline. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Growth performance can be dialed up to steady and predictable rates and it can be a greater source of profits than cost cutting. What are your challenges to growth? Treacy tailors his hard-hitting presentation to address them, replete with compelling case studies. He’ll show how to: imbed growth into the culture of the organization; identify the most attractive and achievable opportunities for profitable growth; decide what needs to be done first; set the plan to make it happen; create a superabundance of innovations that relentlessly bolster the value being provided to the marketplace; and improve the ability to market, sell and retain business. This presentation will lead to breakthrough results for leaders looking to grow – no matter what.

Competing in an Age of Globalizing Markets

Globalization is a relentless march that will impact every industry, every job function and every market segment – though not at the same time nor in the same ways. Globalization of competition is both a threat to established leadership in developed markets and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for dramatic growth in developing economies. What does your future hold?

Michael Treacy will prepare a presentation that looks at the global drivers of change in your industry and the opportunities and challenges they represent. He’ll reveal the strategies and tactics being used by companies who are on the offensive and succeeding. A sample of the issues he will address: how to blunt the impact of upstart companies; how to disable “rise from the bottom” strategy competitors; how to localize new markets effectively; how to organize around where the market is going, instead of where it has been; how to create an operating model that lashes together the best capabilities from around the globe; how to avoid the five common strategic mistakes companies make.

Tuning the Innovation Machine

With the competitive landscape changing on a weekly basis, the ability to orchestrate innovation swiftly and in sync with changing strategic priorities is more important than ever. Nimble is everything these days. How do the best companies innovate with consistent and successful results? What can you learn from them?

How can you adopt and adapt their principles and tactics to tune your innovation machinery to deliver critical improvements in customer value or go-to-market capabilities in record time? How can you anticipate a competitor’s challenge and deliver new value quickly to blunt their effort. Tuning an innovation machine begins with the end: what is your vision of where you want to be? Just as important, will you be leading the needs of the marketplace or behind the curve? Michael Treacy asks the questions that need answering before showing how to organize around a set of principles that are crucial to becoming a high performing innovation machine. Treacy shows how to marshal your physical, intellectual, financial and human capital to develop a consistent and disciplined process that delivers innovation that keeps ahead of the competition.

Leading Growth-Obsessed Organization

The leadership challenge of our time is to align talent and resources to create a culture that’s committed to growth through innovation. Treacy helps leaders look closely at whether the organization’s structure reflects where the business has been – or where the market is going.

More than a plan, Treacy will show leadership specific ways to engage the broad organization to identify, develop, and deploy a mass of innovations in what is offering and in how the firm goes to market that exploit opportunity and compound upon each other to improve customer and shareholder value. Because each company and each industry presents a different set of challenges, Treacy uses extensive research and client interviews to customize his compelling tools, frameworks and case studies to the specific needs of each audience. He delivers fresh thinking that hits close to home and will inspire the team to look at things differently. Treacy shows how to rise to the growth challenge and engage leaders at every level to communicate an exciting vision of the future that drives the innovation that delivers growth.

Testimonials

Michael Treacy was a HUGE success. Everyone at the meeting was raving about how excellent his presentation was. In fact, Chuck (the CEO) stated at the end of the meeting in front of the entire audience, that he was the best speaker he has heard!

Being a new guy at PPG, I am still learning the culture and trying to move the organization in the right direction. As you can imagine, picking the outside speaker is a huge gamble. You made me look good. Thanks.

- PPG Industries, Inc.