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 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.

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.

Companies that increase revenue significantly year in and year possess a rigorous management process that aggressively seeks revenue increases in five fundamental areas:

• Retention of existing customers.
• Market share gains.
• Market positioning exploitation.
• Adjacent market entry.
• New business investment.

Dr. Treacy demonstrates, through fresh and compelling case examples, that the foundation of steady double-digit growth is a discipline that can be developed by any management team. With a structured growth discipline, firms are more likely to achieve high growth by "grinding it out" than they are by "betting the farm" on risky strategies.

Customer Loyalty: Myths and Realities

Customers aren't loyal to suppliers. They're loyal to only one thing - best value. This topic focuses on the myth of customer loyalty and the realities of customer retention. While many corporations have invested in expensive loyalty reward programs, complicated customer relationship management schemes, and lots of loyalty consulting advice to attract and retain customers, the results have been marginal at best. To keep your customers and gain new ones, you must understand the advantages that incumbency bestows and how to use those advantages to create powerful value that wins the customers' business again and again. During this session you will:

• Learn what loyalty programs don't work...and should be stopped.
• Gain a powerful understanding of the principles of base retention, the advantages of incumbency, and the discipline to achieve higher retention rates.
• Hear fresh case examples of successes and failures in customer retention
• Harrah's Entertainment, Washington Mutual, GE Medical, etc.
• Gain practical advice on how to grow by improving the retention of your customer base.

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 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."

During this session you will:

• Learn what it takes to become a category killer in your market.
• Develop a powerful language for linking strategy to organization design. - Hear fresh case examples of successes and failures in customer value leadership, selected for relevance to the particular audience.
• Learn to tackle the challenges of switching from one value discipline to another.
• Gain practical insight in how to grow market share in head-to-head competition.

Growth Beyond the Core Business

Every company eventually looks to expand its growth horizons beyond its core market. Whether it's simply targeting faster growing market segments or acquiring a business in an entirely separate market, these moves bring new competition, added complexities, and unknown risks. Michael Treacy examines what it takes to grow successfully beyond a company's core market. Through case examples, you'll gain practical insight into the challenges of growth in related markets. He dispels several myths about competitive advantage and humorously describes some of the all-time worst attempts to grow beyond core businesses.

During this session you will:

• Learn how to assess the need for growth beyond the core market.
• Gain a powerful understanding of the distinct challenges of growing in a new segment, an adjacent market or an entirely new line of business.
• Hear fresh case examples of successes and failures in growth beyond the core market - selected for relevance to the particular audience.
• Gain practical, implementable advice on how to grow your business outside its core market.

Sales Excellence: Building a System for Growth

It takes a system to create a sale. Not just an energetic sales force, not just a valued product but an entire system - sales processes, performance information, roles and controls - is needed to create sales excellence. This session will discuss leading edge examples of sales effectiveness and draw out important implications for change within your sales system.

During this Session you will:

• Learn how to create a Growth Reconciliation Statement to track and diagnose your company's selling effectiveness.
• Gain a powerful understanding of how to make sales processes structured, disciplined and streamlined.
• Develop a broader set of options for how to organize, staff, train, and lead a selling organization.
• Gain practical advice on how to improve sales force effectiveness.

Systematic Product Breakthroughs

In markets crowded with "me-too" products it is more important than ever that product leaders aim higher for truly breakthrough products. Yet, this is a risky business. Only one in seven early stage product developments ever makes it to market. How can a company aim for bigger results from 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 and how do you predict the technology that will launch your products into their next lifespan? This remarkable session will answer that question and discuss several companies that have revolutionized their product innovation efforts using a research methodology first developed in Russia. The revolution in product research and development has begun.

During this session you will:

• Gain a powerful understanding of the impact of product innovation on corporate performance and growth.
• Develop a deeper understanding of the Product Leadership value discipline.
  
• Learn about the TRIZ++ methodology for systematic innovation and technical creativity.
• Gain practical advice on how to create superior product innovation in less time and at no additional cost.

Successful Cross Selling

Many a company has set out to build growth by selling products and services from one division into the customer base of another division, only to be stymied by passive sales resistance and customer indifference. Why is cross-selling such a difficult tactic to implement in most organizations? Why aren't sales organizations willing to exploit their knowledge of current accounts for further gain? And why aren't our customers interested in buying the full complement of our offering? This session examines what it takes to grow and successfully implement a cross selling program.

During this session you will:

• Gain a powerful understanding of the distinct challenges of growing through cross-selling
• Learn how to design a cross-selling program that can really work
• Hear fresh case examples of successes and failures in cross-selling activities selected for relevance to the particular audience
• Gain practical, implementable advice on how to grow through cross-selling.

Outsourcing and Offshoring - Myths and Realities

Outsourcing (when a firm contracts with an outside supplier for work) and offshoring (when a company moves domestic work overseas) are controversial and complex innovation strategies that are, nevertheless, gaining in appeal. The drive to maintain competitive parity is causing companies to seek focused and specialized suppliers that can perform internal tasks and processes with greater productivity and to re-evaluate where work best gets performed to meet the needs of increasingly demanding global markets. The opponents of outsourcing and offshoring maintain that these strategies will weaken domestic competitors in the long run and that jobs are being sacrificed for profits.
Which view is correct? What should a prudent company do?

In this session, Michael Treacy looks at the actual impact of outsourcing and offshoring on jobs, company performance, and competitiveness. This presentation will, in part, draw on Mr. Treacy's personal experiences with offshoring. Dr. Treacy has built a firm that creates new product innovations for large American firms using science and technology sourced from Russia and Eastern Europe. So the debate is this: is this a company outsourcing and offshoring jobs - or onshoring intellectual property that ultimately creates a multitude of new jobs? And which workers and firms are harmed and helped in the process? Many a myth will be shattered in this session with common sense analysis and straight talk.

During this session you will:

• Learn whether your firm must be considering outsourcing and offshoring options and gain a powerful understanding of the impact that these strategies can have on company performance, employment, and competitiveness.
• Hear fresh case examples of successes and failures in outsourcing and offshoring and gain practical advice on whether and how to implement these strategies in your firm.

Revolutionizing Product Innovation

In markets crowded with "me-too" products it is more important than ever that product leaders aim higher, for truly breakthrough products. 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 our products into their next lifespan?

This remarkable session will answer 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.

During this session you will learn:

• Fresh approaches for identifying new product opportunities
• How to put aside brainstorming and customer research and embrace functional analysis.
• The strengths and limitations of the stage gate process in product development
• How to upgrade the quality and impact of incremental innovations to respond to unmet customer needs
• The timing and the placement of 'next generation' products.
• How being too early can be as fatal as being too late to market.
• Rethinking the mix of resources required for effective product innovation-do you need to outsource more of your R&D activities?
  
• How to break through internal barriers that hamper new product development.

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 thatthis marketplace will continue to transform, in reaction to spiraling costs, at an accelerating rate.

Michael Treacy explores the challenges health care organizations face in order to sustain and improve their growth performance:

• They must proactively and effectively adapt their operating model to changing market conditions. As the basis of competition changes in a market, too often market leaders are stranded by their own historical competencies.
• They must prepare to grow in flatter revenue markets. This will require a more disciplined approach to growth, akin to a disciplined approach to cost containment, which few health care organizations have mastered.

This presentation will explore these twin challenges of proactive change and disciplined growth. It will use examples from health care organizations and beyond to illustrateeffective strategies for thriving in a changing market.