Matthew E. May
- Creator, The Idea Score
Matthew E. May Speaker Biography
Matthew E. May is an internationally recognized thought leader on strategy, innovation, and lean. Working as a solo advisor and coach, he specializes in helping senior executives and their teams craft innovative strategies and build the capabilities to implement them.
Matt has written five books on innovative thinking, his latest being WINNING THE BRAIN GAME: Fixing the 7 Fatal Flaws of Thinking (McGraw Hill, 2016). His work has appeared in The New York Times, Inc. , Strategy+Business, The Rotman Magazine, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review blogs. Matt holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BA from Johns Hopkins University, but he counts winning the New Yorker cartoon caption contest as one of his most creative achievements.
Matt has a deep passion for ideas ideas that solve a difficult problem in an elegant way. He defines an elegant solution as one that is both uncommonly simple and surprisingly powerful, and that achieves the maximum effect with minimum means.
Above all, Matt is a practitioner of business strategy and innovation with powerful lessons learned and war stories to tell from years in the trenches with companies ranging from small startups to companies as large and multinational as Toyota, where he spent eight years as a full-time advisor.
Matt blends his frontline experience with research from his books in order to deliver useful concepts with immediate application, and aims to achieve four things in every address: 1. inspire new thinking; 2. share a unique perspective; 3. tell compelling stories; and 4. deliver practical takeaways.
To book Matthew E. May call Executive Speakers Bureau at 901-754-9404.
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Speech Topics
MIND OF THE INNOVATOR: How Game-Changers “Think Different”
The pressure to stand out and stay relevant in a fiercely competitive marketplace demands innovative thinking to jump the curve and move to the next level. That pressure falls squarely on the shoulders of the individual, because companies don’t innovate, people do. The tension between business objectives and creative thinking isn’t easily resolved…unless you can tame the traps of traditional thinking. In this compelling keynote, Matthew takes the audience inside the minds of the world’s most creative executives and entrepreneurs to reveal how they crush the status quo, write their own rules, change the game, and move the world.
ELEGANT LEADERSHIP: Secrets to Achieving the Maximum Effect With Minimum Means
Amidst an arguably expanding world economy, one fact stands clear: business leaders are facing a scarcity of resources. Materials cost increases and other financial burdens combined with an ever-shrinking pool of top talent leaves leaders facing a critical capability challenge. Enter the concept of elegance: achieving the maximum effect with minimum means. In this compelling keynote, Matthew reveals how the best leaders spur creativity and innovation among their ranks by imposing intelligent constraints.
COMPETING FOR THE FUTURE: The Art of Playing to Win
Leaders at every level face the same daunting challenge: how to win consistently in a massively disruptive business environment. Enter the need for a forward-looking strategy that enables a player to create a sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition. In this talk, Matthew show leaders how to begin with a future-back winning aspiration, then answer two deceptively simple questions: Where will you play? and How will you win? Blending compelling examples with stories from years of front-line experience facilitating strategy sessions, this keynote delivers a master class on competing for the future.
WINNING THE BRAIN GAME
This provocative and highly interactive keynote speech is based my latest book Winning the Brain Game. Participants will engage in the same simple thought challenges given to over 100K people during a 10-year period, revealing seven mental glitches that stymie our best thinking.
THE MAGIC OF SUBTRACTION
This keynote draws upon my book The Laws of Subtraction. I outline six simple rules for standing out and staying relevant in a massively distracting world, built on a single yet powerful idea: When you remove just the right things in just the right way, something good happens.
DESIGNING ELEGANT SOLUTIONS
This popular speech is based on my two first books, The Elegant Solution and In Pursuit of Elegance. Drawing on my years with Toyota, I deliver the key elements to creating and developing ideas and solutions that achieve the maximum effect with the minimum means.
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