Biography

Michael Treacy is President and Founder of Treacy & Company, based in Boston. He brings over 35 years of experience helping companies achieve market leadership. Companies across the globe have used Michael’s ideas about customer value propositions and growth disciplines to reshape strategies, bolster competitive positions, and dramatically improve top and bottom-line performances.

Michael’s ideas 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 & Company’s work draws on Michael’s three decades of research on business performance. His most recent book titled, Double Digit Growth: How Companies Achieve It No Matter What, has been a Business Week bestseller. It presents a commonsense approach for achieving superior, profitable growth. His earlier coauthored book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, has been 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 large and small companies have adopted these principles to drive their business strategies and build competitive advantage.  Michael has also published numerous articles over the past two decades in many popular magazines and journals and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.

Formerly a Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michael received his Ph.D. from MIT and his engineering degree from the University of Toronto. He has been a board member for several leveraged buyouts and new ventures.

Michael enjoys researching and collecting 18th and 19th century art and artifacts produced in China for the Western market and reading about history, from any period and for every region of the world. Michael enjoys living in a natural environment with his family and 9 dogs, removed from the hustle and bustle of urban life.

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Videos

Michael Treacy - Growth Through Innovation - Part 1

Michael Treacy - Growth Through Innovation - Part 2

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Speech TopicsExpand each topic to learn more

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 customizes 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 f the future that drives the innovation that delivers growth.

National Policy for a Globalizing Economy

Market leadership in a global economy is the fight of a lifetime with nothing less than the national interest is at stake. This
presentation is meant to be a call to action for policy makers and shapers – examining how the U.S. lost market leadership
in key industries and what lessons we can learn to avoid a repeat. Treacy arms the audience with the new rules of the
global competitiveness and advocates the creation of national policies that will ensure competitiveness, job gains, economic
growth, international prestige and security. He looks at the role wage rates, labor productivity and fiscal policies play in
the competitive landscape. Treacy looks at how government can incent innovation through the competitiveness of domestic
markets, ease of access to capital, labor flexibility, and modified levels of regulation. He suggests a more realistic view of
immigration and beefed up commitment to education which will put the U.S. on a par with the nations turning out to be our
most competitive challengers in the marketplace. Finally he suggests a re-evaluation of how corporate and individual tax
policy affects where corporate headquarters, operations, and jobs are located.

Testimonials

Michael Treacy has given us a provocative, thoughtful and very useful book about managing for business growth. He shatters myths and misperceptions about growth and then provides many pragmatic and powerful insights from his research findings and case studies about the real drivers of sustained growth. His view of strategy for growth is organic and multifaceted, and based upon building and sustaining momentum over time.
– Dr. Thomas Gerrity, Professor and Former Dean of The Wharton School
Michael Treacy offers a primer on the five paths to sustained growth - there really are no other options.
– Michael H. Jordan, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, EDS - Peter I. Bijur, Retired Chairman and CEO, Texaco
In business, the wins and losses are measured by growth. Either you grow or you lose. Michael Treacy presents a disciplined new way to think about business growth, based on intensive analysis and his intimate knowledge of the challenges facing private sector leaders. Treacy's insights here will provoke fresh approaches.
– aul Tagliabue, National Football League Commissioner
Michael Treacy does it again!
– Dr. Jean-Pierre Garnier, Chief Executive Officer, GlaxoSmithKline
Growth is the oxygen of success in business. Without it, your enterprise withers. Michael Treacy offers a crash course in teaching your company to grow.
– Thomas G. Stemberg, Founder Executive Chairman, Staples

Booksby Michael Treacy

Double-Digit Growth

The Discipline of Market Leaders

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