Bill Taylor

The Hard Work of Big Change

Rules for Transforming Your Organization and Challenging Yourself

In an era of hyper-competition and non-stop disruption, the most urgent work is the work of making meaningful, deep-seated change in organizations everywhere. When customers have higher expectations than ever, digital technologies and new business models create more choices than ever, and political and social trends create more turmoil than ever, then familiar strategies and established ways of working are less effective than ever. That means even the most successful companies have to rethink and reimagine every aspect of how they do business and deliver results—building on their past success, as they build out a new perspective on the future. But how do you break new ground when there is so much pressure to avoid mistakes? How do you keep people focused and confident in a world that seems so uncertain? In short, how do you unleash long-lasting, positive change in organizations in turbulent, fast-moving times? These are the questions Bill Taylor addresses in his provocative and energizing keynote. His message is designed to help leaders from all walks of life transform their organizations, shake up their industries, and challenge themselves. He brings his message to life with colorful stories of organizations that are unleashing innovations and driving transformations in all sorts of fields—from retail to software, automobiles to financial services, hotels to hospitals. Ultimately, Bill’s message, lessons, and stories amount to a manifesto for managing change and a manual for achieving it—at a moment when change is the name of the game.

Leadership in An Age of Disruption

Don’t Let What You Know Limit What You Can Imagine

In a world being remade before our eyes, leaders who make a difference are the ones who can reimagine what’s possible at their organization and in their field, and who can turn bold strategies into relentless execution. And they’re not just CEOs; they’re executives running business units, managers in charge of key departments, engineers or marketers running project teams, entrepreneurs building a company from scratch. Regardless of their formal role or title in the organization, high-impact leaders exude both originality and utility—provocative thinking that energizes their colleagues, a roll-up-the-sleeves approach to work and culture that shapes how everyone shares ideas and solves problems. Put simply, the best leaders are the most insatiable learners and the most effective communicators. In this inspiring and instructive keynote, Bill Taylor shows why he is one of the most popular leadership speakers. He offers hands-on thinking gleaned from the most extraordinary leaders he’s studied over the last 25 years. These leaders have many different personalities and styles, they’ve built very different kinds of companies and organizations, but they’ve all wrestled with the defining questions that face leaders everywhere—questions whose answers amount to a new agenda for leadership. The challenge for leaders today is to help their organizations see things that other organizations don’t see, and do things that other organizations can’t or won’t do. Bill’s insights, stories, and takeaways prepare leaders at every level to master that challenge.

New Rules for Entrepreneurs

Succeeding in a World Where the Smart Take from the Strong

There has never been a more exciting time to be an entrepreneur, whether it’s building a company from a blank sheet of paper, launching or investing in a franchise, or starting something new inside an established organization. In the old world of business, the strong took from the weak. If you had the deepest pockets, the biggest factories or labs, the best-known brands, you won by virtue of your power. In the new world of business, the smart take from the strong. The most successful entrepreneurs don’t try to out-compete their bigger rivals; they redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking. Thanks to the revolutions in computing, communications, and social media, along with an explosion of new business models and new sources of financing, smaller and smaller groups of people can do bigger and bigger things. In this provocative and pragmatic keynote targeted to entrepreneurs, small-business leaders, and franchise owners and operators, Bill Taylor offers a set of principles and a collection of case studies drawn from some of the world’s most successful company-builders: founders of small banks, restaurants, retailers, consumer-product companies, software firms, franchises, even a parking garage. These hard-charging entrepreneurial leaders are winning big by changing the game in their fields. Bill offers a new business plan for entrepreneurial growth, and hands-on advice for turning goals into results.

Talent, Culture, and the New World of Work

How to Unleash and Sustain Fierce Execution and Nonstop Innovation

Business today is about distinctive competitive strategies, game-changing technologies, and creative social media and marketing. But the most successful organizations, those built on fierce executive and nonstop innovation, work as distinctively as they compete. The first question great organizations can answer is: What separates us from our rivals in the marketplace? But the next question is: What holds us together as colleagues in the workplace? In an era of brash ideas and disruptive business models, organizations that create the most extraordinary value are the ones that generate the most widely shared sense of commitment, connection, and compassion among colleagues. Whether you’re in a fast-moving technology field or a more traditional, slow-to-change industry, your organization can’t be exceptional in the marketplace unless it creates something exceptional in the workplace. In a keynote that is at once highly strategic and deeply human, Bill Taylor draws on his access to some of the world’s most high-performing and creative workplaces to explore how organizations can unleash and sustain a culture of fierce execution and nonstop innovation. His ideas, lessons, diagnostics, and case studies are a pragmatic guide to the new world of work and a cutting-edge agenda for recruiting, evaluating, organizing, and retaining talent.

“The standing room only crowd was a testament to both Bill Taylor’s content and style and the incredible interest our participants had in his material.”
— Jewish Federations of North America

“Bill Taylor knocked it out of the park! He had a great style and delivery, and the message was bang-on what we were looking for. He also did the best job I’ve ever seen of tying his message back to comments and examples from internal speakers that spoke before him. We really enjoyed having him.”
— General Mills

“Bill Taylor was outstanding. He was an entertaining storyteller who did a great job of connecting the dots between our business and his knowledge of client experience and innovation.”
— Shook, Hardy and Bacon

“Bill Taylor’s attention-getting, audience-grabbing style and message really worked with our team. He was enjoyed by the entire audience.”
— Philips Healthcare

“Bill Taylor’s presentation was excellent! I was sitting next to one of our senior officers who was VERY impressed with his message. I got a lot of positive feedback from the attendees on his presentation. He was a pleasure to work with.”
— LIMRA