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William Taylor
Founding Editor, Fast Company and
Co-author, Mavericks at Work |
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Fee Code: 4
Travels from: Massachusetts
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 Speech Topics
Practically Radical: Unleashing Big Change in Tough Times
Preview Speech Clip
Hard times can be a great time to separate yourself from the pack and build advantages for years to come—if you can summon the leadership nerve to take risks. Over the past two years, Bill Taylor has had in-depth access to 25 organizations that are masters at making change—organizations that are unleashing innovations and driving transformations in trying circumstances. Using lessons set in a variety of fields (from healthcare to software, from automobiles to financial services, from hotels to hospitals) Bill shows his audience how to shake up their industry, transform their company and recharge themselves. Here are some of his core messages:
- What you see shapes how you change. The most successful companies don’t just outcompete their rivals; they redefine the terms of competition by embracing unique ideas.
- Where you look shapes what you see. The most creative CEOs aspire to learn from innovators far outside their industry as a way to leapfrog their rivals.
- There’s nothing wrong with your organization that can’t be fixed by what’s right with our organization. Savvy change agents don’t disavow the past. They rediscover and reinterpret what’s come before as a way to develop a line of sight into what comes next.
- The best way to change your business is to make change a normal part of doing business. The most direct way to increase urgency is to redefine how the organization monitors results and measures success—and, in so doing, to make business as usual look like it’s bad for business.
Practically Radical Roundtable: Inspiration Plus Execution
Preview Speech Clip
Leaders who are eager to make change need both originality and utility—provocative thinking that can energize their organizations, roll-up-the-sleeves advice they can put to work right away. This creative keynote delivers that blend. In a short opener, Bill Taylor sets forth a group of messages about how to make deep-seated change in trying times. These messages set the stage for an instructive and entertaining conversation with panelists chosen for their relevance to the audience: senior executives from a company holding a leadership offsite, key customers for a company doing an annual sales meeting, highly regarded CEOs for an association meeting. This is a blend of the radical and the practical, the inspirational and the instructional. Here are some of the core lessons:
- Strategy: You can’t be “pretty good” at everything anymore. You have to be the most of something: the most affordable, the most accessible, the most elegant, the most colorful, the most transparent. Today, the middle of the road is the road to ruin.
- Innovation: The most powerful ideas come from the most unexpected places—the “hidden genius” inside your company, the “collective genius” of customers, suppliers, and other smart people. It may be lonely at the top, but change is not a game best played by loners.
- Leadership: In a world that never stops changing, great leaders can never stop learning. How do you push yourself as an individual to keep growing and evolving, so that your company can do the same?
"A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste": Leading Through a Downturn
Preview Speech Clip
We’re all struggling to make sense of the economic crisis that will shape the business agenda for years to come, to learn lessons that will guide us going forward. In this keynote, Taylor urges leaders not to learn the wrong lessons from the crisis. As the business environment gets tougher, meaner and more unforgiving, customers are going to get even more selective about with whom they do business. Now more than ever, companies and their leaders have to figure out how to offer a positive alternative to a demoralizing status quo. He urges leaders to embrace the proposition that:
- Being different makes all the difference. The best-performing companies and brands don’t look, talk, act or compete the same way as all others do —especially in a troubled market.
- If your customers can live without you, eventually they will. The goal of your company must be to become irreplaceable in the eyes of its customers, to create a psychological contract that sets you apart.
- Brand is culture, culture is brand. In a period of economic turmoil, if you want to keep customers engaged, you have to keep your people engaged.
Tough Problems, New Remedies: A Practically Radical Prescription for Health Care
Now that healthcare reform is the law of the land, leaders in the field will accelerate the transition from debating the merits of legislation to devising the future of their organizations—in an environment reshaped by public policy and private pressures. In this healthcare-oriented keynote, Bill Taylor offers an agenda for progress and change drawn from a wide range of health-care innovators as well as innovators from other industries. He addresses the following issues:
- How do you rethink your strategy in a fast-changing environment?
- How do you manage costs and unleash innovation at the same time?
- How do you connect with customers who have higher expectations and more access to information?
- How do you design interactions that don’t just cure your patients but also ensure that they feel good about their experiences with you?
- How do you transfer creative ideas from other industries to the tightly regulated (and highly scrutinized) world of healthcare?
Mavericks at Work: The New Business Agenda
When it comes to thriving in a hypercompetitive marketplace, playing it safe is no longer playing it smart. In an economy marked by overcapacity, oversupply, and utter sensory overload, the only way to stand out is to embrace a truly distinctive set of ideas. Taylor explores the maverick strategies and companies that define business in the 21st century. He challenges his audience to consider these questions:
- Is there a distinctive and disruptive sense of purpose that sets you apart?
- Do you have a vocabulary of competition that is unique to your industry and compelling to your customers and employees?
- If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would miss you and why?
Nobody Is as Smart as Everybody: The Maverick Style of Leadership
From where do great ideas come? The traditional answer is that big ideas come from big thinkers. But what happens when markets become so unpredictable that no individual leader can think of everything? In this mind-altering presentation, Taylor demonstrates the power of a new model of invention that opens your organization to the outside. Brilliant people don’t have to work for you, he explains, in order to work with you. Here are some principles for attracting the best ideas from the most people:
- Keep your focus narrow and tightly defined. There’s a big difference between tapping outside brainpower and engaging in free-form brainstorming.
- Keep broadening the participants—the most amazing ideas often come from the most surprising places.
- Don’t keep all the benefits to yourself. If you expect people to share their best ideas with you, they’ll expect something in return.
Business as If People Mattered: A Maverick Approach to HR
The best companies are as rigorous and creative about hiring enthusiastic staff members as they are about every other element of their business. If you believe that companies compete on the power of their ideas, then you must also believe that they compete on the quality and passion of their people. Taylor’s presentation brings a hard edge to a notoriously soft topic. He shares answers to some of the most basic people-related questions:
- Why would great people want to be part of your company?
- How do you know a great person when you see one?
- How can you find great people who aren’t looking for you?
From Selling Value to Sharing Values: A Maverick Agenda for Marketing
There is a paradox at the heart of the relationship between companies and customers. Products get cheaper and better, yet customers get less satisfied. That’s because when almost everything gets cheaper every year, offering customers a "good deal" won't win them over or keep them happy. In this presentation, Taylor offers lessons from innovators who maintain enduring connections with their customers. He challenges his audience to answer these concerns:
- Are you irreplaceable in your customers’ eyes?
- Do you treat different customers differently?
- Is your presence in the marketplace aligned with your culture in the workplace?
About William Taylor
Bill Taylor has a passion for the new ideas and tools driving business. He shook up the business magazine world with the launch of Fast Company, which redefined the genre and focused on the champions of change and growth who were reinventing their companies and their industries.
Bill Taylor is a best-selling author, celebrated entrepreneur, and groundbreaking thinker on leadership and innovation. His first book, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, became a New York Times bestseller and received widespread media accolades. The Economist called it “a pivotal work in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Good to Great” and it was listed as a “best book” on Amazon.com, The Financial Times, and BusinessWeek. His next book, Practical Radical: Strategies to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Recharge Yourself (2011), appears in blog form for Harvard Business Online, the digital arm of the Harvard Business Review. Bill made his name as a hugely successful editor and entrepreneur, having taken Fast Company—the award-winning magazine he co-founded—from startup to $340 million sale in less than six years. A maverick himself, Bill advocates a people-centric leadership model, a network approach to cultivating ideas and a relentless focus on being extraordinary as the key ways to achieve market dominance. Provocative and inspiring, Bill offers first-hand accounts of how game changers like Meg Whitman and Zappos’ Tony Hsieh transformed their industries by adopting these approaches and abandoning ineffectual “business as usual” practices, and insights into how you can do the same in your own organization.
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