Michael Treacy

Biography

Michael Treacy brings over 30 years of experience helping companies achieve market leadership. His 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.

Mr. Treacy`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.

He is the founder of Treacy & Company Inc., a new venture and consulting firm that launches new businesses and advises established companies on issues of strategy, growth, and profitability. Treacy & Company actively plans, funds, and launches new business ventures. The firm places its own capital at risk where it believes that its strategic insights and management advice can lead to marketplace success. Among its ventures are GEN3 Partners, a firm based in Boston and St. Petersburg, Russia dedicated to creating science-based product innovations and First Help Financial, a firm that provides automobile financing to new immigrants.

Treacy & Company also serves some of the world`s best known companies in financial services, telecommunications, industrial products, healthcare, and consumer goods. The work of the firm draws on Mr. Treacy`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 common sense approach for achieving superior, profitable growth. His earlier co-authored 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 companies large and small have adopted these principles to drive their own business strategies and build competitive advantage.

Mr. Treacy 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. Mr. Treacy is 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.

Formerly a Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. 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. Mr. Treacy resides in Needham, Massachusetts with his wife and three children.

Publications

Double-Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve It--No Matter What

The best-selling author of The Discipline of Market Leaders reveals how companies can achieve sustained growth.

In their 1995 blockbuster The Discipline of Market Leaders, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema explained how great companies dominated their markets by offering superior value propositions. Now Treacy is back with an equally groundbreaking book-revealing how great companies master growth each year and how all businesses can identify and exploit opportunities for increased revenues, gross margins, and profits.

Treacy`s main point is simple-it really is possible to grow your business by 10 percent or more, year after year, in good times and bad, without cheating. Great companies already know how to do it, and the rest of us can learn their strategies and do the same thing. Using case studies from industry leaders such as Dell Computer, Home Depot, and GE, he shows the five steps that are imperative to ensure growth:

-keep the growth you have already earned
-look for growth where it`s likely to be found
-take business from your competitors

Treacy believes that any business can grow at a consistent double-digit rate, and with Double-Digit Growth, managers and investors now have the tools to achieve that lofty goal and maintain corporate success.

Titles

Sustained Double Digit Growth
Growth, the lifeblood of industry, is the ability of a company to increase its revenues and profits by expanding its business-either by acquiring other companies, increasing its market share, or penetrating new or adjacent markets. Believing that many of the formulas for growth were wrong, incomplete or outdated, Michael Treacy set out five years ago to try to crack the growth conundrum. This speech will outline the principles and disciplines for making double-digit growth a reality in your company.

The Anatomy of Sustained High Performance
We all know it when we see it. The perfectly executed pass, a balletic basketball play, the scintillating guitar riff. Often built on individual skill, awesome performance results from a special combination of talent, deliberate practice, learning and sheer hard work.

Organizations, too, are awesome performers --in sports, the arts, education and business. Think of the many sports dynasties, the superb symphonies and ballets, the highly productive research institutes and, of course, those iconic companies who consistently and over time achieve record levels of growth, productivity and innovation.

While we easily recognize awesome performance, we have a limited understanding of how to build it and sustain it in large organizations. Traditional thinking on the subject such as the strategy, leadership and the process reengineering schools are of little help. Like blind men with the elephant, each school is convinced what they are holding comprises the whole.

Based on his multi-year global research program into the anatomy of performance, Michael Treacy will discuss the ways in which senior executives can create and sustain awesome performance, especially in today`s environment of ever-increasing change, turbulence and complexity. He will describe an entirely new approach to performance improvement, one that is centered on the capacity for and speed of learning, innovation, and adaptation. He will highlight the limits of our current planning, budgeting and control processes and demonstrate a new approach based on experimentation, discovery and the compounding effects of small improvements. Treacy will conclude with specific and practical actions CEOs and their executives can take to establish the initial conditions for success in their organizations.

Value Leadership: The Discipline of Market Leaders
Do you want to be the leader in your industry? Do you want to provide the best offering for your customers, whether that is the best products, the best solution or the best total cost? Do you want to have the capability to offer your customers better value year after year? This session uses the principles of Michael Treacy`s co-authored best seller, The Discipline of Market Leaders. Translated into 18 languages, with about one million copies in print, this book revolutionized thinking about markets and competition. This session has revolutionary ideas about markets and competition, and introduces new terms such as "value propositions" and "customer intimacy."

Outsourcing and Offshoring and the Wealth of Nations
Outsourcing (when a firm contracts with an outside supplier for work) and offshoring (when a company moves domestic work overseas) are controversial and complex strategies that are, nevertheless, gaining in appeal. The drive to maintain competitive parity has caused companies to seek specialized suppliers that can perform tasks and processes with greater productivity and to re-evaluate where work best gets performed. Opponents of outsourcing and offshoring maintain that this weakens domestic competitors in the long run and that jobs are being sacrificed for profits. Which view is correct? What should a prudent executive do?

In this session, Michael Treacy looks at the impact of outsourcing and offshoring on jobs, company performance, and competitiveness. This presentation, in part, draws on Treacy`s managerial experience with offshoring -- he has established a company that provides product innovations for large American firms using science and technology sourced from overseas. So the debate, more broadly, is this: Is this a company outsourcing and offshoring R&D jobs - or onshoring intellectual property that ultimately creates new jobs? And which workers and firms are harmed and helped in the process? Many a myth are shattered in this session with common sense analysis and straight talk.

Revolutionizing Product Innovation
In markets glutted with "me-too" products, it is more important than ever that product leaders aim higher.

Yet, only one in seven early stage product developments ever make it to market.

How can a company grow product research and development while simultaneously lowering the time and risk of innovation? What is the best method to determine the lifecycle of your current products? How do you predict the technology that will launch your products into their next lifespan?

This session will address these questions and discuss case examples of companies that have revolutionized their product innovation efforts. Mr. Treacy will draw on his experiences as a co-founder of GEN3 Partners, a product innovation firm based in Russia and the United States that works with a wide range of companies around the world on some of their most important product innovation challenges. Of GEN3`s many innovations, perhaps the best-known was their work for Proctor and Gamble that yielded the creation of Crest Whitestrips, the most successful new product launch P&G has ever had.

Sustaining Growth in a Changing Health Care Marketplace
Whether a provider of health care services, an insurer of health care costs, a manufacturer of health care products, or a service provider to those firms, expanding health care costs has provided plenty of growth in revenue and profits for everyone. But medical inflation has also laid the seeds for significant changes in the health care marketplace.

Whether the health care marketplace ever becomes truly consumer-driven, whether employers completely shift health insurance from a defined benefit to a defined contribution, and whether the government is prepared to fully allow market forces to reshape health care delivery, are all open to debate. What is not debatable, though, is that this marketplace will continue to transform, in reaction to spiraling costs, at an accelerating rate.