Bill Taylor
Most organisations facing pressure to change already know what to do differently – they’ve read the reports and attended the conferences. The real problem is that past success has made the status quo feel like strategy. The expertise that built a business becomes the ceiling on what leaders can imagine for it.
Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company and author of Simply Brilliant, helps organisations break the grip of their own accumulated expertise and find paths to breakthrough performance that their competitors are too comfortable to see.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Bill Taylor
- His central argument – that the most dangerous thing in a successful organisation is its own track record – gives leadership teams a precise, uncomfortable diagnosis, not a generic call to “innovate more.”
- Simply Brilliant provides a detailed, case-study-backed framework for achieving breakthrough performance in traditional and unglamorous fields, making it directly applicable to organisations outside tech and consumer markets.
- His research spans companies most strategy consultants never study – regional banks, industrial manufacturers, office cleaning businesses – which means his examples land with audiences tired of hearing about Apple and Amazon.
- His Mavericks at Work thesis – that the most successful competitors don’t try to out-execute rivals but redefine the terms of competition altogether – gives strategy teams a concrete alternative to benchmarking their way to mediocrity.
- As a former HBR editor and founding editor of a magazine that sold for $340 million, he brings practitioner credibility to arguments about how organisations actually change, not just how they should.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder and founding editor, Fast Company, with Alan Webber; magazine sold for $340 million within six years of founding
- Former editor, Harvard Business Review
- Author of three books published by Portfolio/Penguin: Simply Brilliant (2016), Practically Radical, and Mavericks at Work
- Mavericks at Work: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller; named “Business Book of the Year” by both The Economist and the Financial Times
- Simply Brilliant named “Best Strategy and Leadership Book of 2016” by 800CEORead
- Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review; former “Under New Management” columnist, New York Times Sunday Business; former columnist, The Guardian
- Graduate of Princeton University (BA) and MIT Sloan School of Management (MBA)
- Named “Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance” by the American Society for Training and Development, alongside past recipients Jack Welch and Fred Smith
Biography
Fast Company was built on a single provocation: that the rules of business competition were being rewritten, and most organisations were too comfortable to notice. Bill Taylor co-founded the magazine from borrowed office space in Harvard Square, and within six years it had sold for $340 million – at the time, the second-highest price ever paid for a single magazine in the United States. The argument that drove it has shaped his work ever since.
Taylor’s three books – Mavericks at Work, Practically Radical, and Simply Brilliant – are each structured around the same core tension: why do organisations with genuine competitive advantages so often fail to sustain them? His answer, developed most fully in Simply Brilliant, is that expertise becomes a trap. The knowledge that produced past performance quietly closes off the thinking that would produce future performance. It is not disruption from outside that limits most organisations – it is the weight of their own accumulated success.
What makes this argument useful in practice is where Taylor looks for evidence. His case studies are not drawn from Silicon Valley or the usual gallery of tech unicorns. They come from regional banks, industrial suppliers, auto dealerships, and office cleaning companies – settings where leaders have no option to blame their industry for mediocrity. Simply Brilliant was named the best strategy and leadership book of 2016 by 800CEORead. Mavericks at Work was named “Business Book of the Year” by both The Economist and the Financial Times.
Taylor writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and held an editorial role there before Fast Company. His work is consistently focused on a single, testable question: what does it actually take for leaders to let go of what made them successful, and build something better?
Key speaking topics
- Organisational innovation beyond technology
- Breaking the experience trap in established industries
- Competitive strategy and differentiation
- Culture as competitive advantage
- Leadership imagination and renewal
- Change management in traditional organisations
- Talent, engagement, and high-performance culture
Ideal for
- CEOs and senior leadership teams in established, non-tech industries facing competitive reinvention
- Strategy and transformation leads planning large-scale organisational change programmes
- Executive conferences where the audience has heard the Silicon Valley playbook and needs a different frame
- CHROs and culture leads connecting people strategy to competitive performance
Audience outcomes
- A named framework for diagnosing why expertise becomes an obstacle to growth – and what to do about it
- Case studies from non-tech, traditional industries that reframe what competitive reinvention looks like in their own sector
- Practical questions for testing whether their organisation’s current strategy is genuinely distinctive or competitively invisible
- A clearer sense of where leadership imagination, rather than market conditions, is the binding constraint on performance
- Language for talking to boards and leadership teams about transformation that doesn’t rely on disruption clichés
Talks
Equips leaders with the strategic and cultural tools to drive meaningful, lasting change in environments of constant disruption – with the argument that “playing it safe” is now among the most dangerous choices an organisation can make.
Key takeaways:
- Why differentiation requires being the only one who does what you do, not the best at what others do
- How to balance the challenge of technological change with the need to put humanity back into the business
- A reframed logic of risk: why the absence of bold change carries greater organisational danger than the presence of it
Makes the case that how an organisation works internally is as distinctive – and as strategically important – as how it competes externally, with evidence from the world’s highest-performing cultures.
Key takeaways:
- The two questions every high-performing organisation can answer: what separates us in the marketplace, and what holds us together in the workplace?
- How to build a culture of commitment, connection, and accountability that sustains innovation over time
- A practical agenda for recruiting, evaluating, and retaining the talent that drives differentiated performance
Draws on twenty-five years of research into exceptional leaders to show how genuine expertise becomes dangerous when it closes off fresh thinking – and how the best leaders stay insatiably curious.
Key takeaways:
- How high-impact leaders make sure their expertise doesn’t get in the way of innovation
- The habits and disciplines that separate leaders who sustain performance from those who optimise for comfort
- Concrete tools for building organisations where people are challenged to be at their best every day