Thomas Barta
Most large organisations are not built to find their next source of growth. They reward people for delivering the plan, not for spotting the opportunity that sits outside it. So the people closest to customers and markets stay quiet, the safe bets win, and the business defends its core while newer rivals take the ground it should have taken first.
Thomas Barta is a former McKinsey partner and organisational psychologist who helps companies grow by turning their people into growth leaders who find new opportunities and move the organisation to act on them.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Thomas Barta
- He shows organisations where their next growth comes from and, just as importantly, how to get risk-averse teams to actually pursue it.
- His McKinsey work training over a thousand internal leaders on driving change without formal authority is the engine of his method: growth needs people who can move an organisation they do not control.
- The behaviours he teaches are drawn from the largest dataset of its kind, more than 68,000 leadership assessments of what separates leaders who shift company performance from those who do not.
- His McGraw-Hill book with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, gives the work a research spine rather than another opinion on growth.
- As leadership dean of the McKinsey and Marketing Academy CMO Fellowship, he prepares senior leaders for the step up to running a business, which keeps his view of growth leadership current.
Biography highlights
- Former partner, McKinsey & Company; advised more than two dozen Fortune 500 organisations across 14 industries and 45 countries.
- Co-author with Patrick Barwise of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader (McGraw-Hill).
- CEO, Marketing Leadership Institute; founder of the Marketing Leadership Masterclass.
- Leadership dean, CMO Fellowship, run by The Marketing Academy with McKinsey.
- Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society.
- Contributor to Forbes, Marketing Week, Nikkei and the Adobe blog; speaker at events for Adobe, Google, IBM, SAP, Oracle, Amazon and the Financial Times.
Biography
Most large organisations are structured to protect what already works. That is exactly why so many of them miss the next wave: over half the Fortune 500 from the year 2000, Kodak and Nokia among them, no longer exist. Thomas Barta’s work addresses the gap between the people who can see a growth opportunity and the far smaller number who can move an organisation to back it.
His method rests on the largest study of its kind. Built on more than 68,000 leadership assessments, conducted with Patrick Barwise of London Business School, it identified the behaviours that separate leaders who shift their company’s trajectory from those who do not. That research became The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, published by McGraw-Hill.
The behavioural engine came earlier, at McKinsey. As a partner he led growth transformations across 14 industries in 45 countries for more than two dozen Fortune 500 organisations. He was also dean of the firm’s highest-rated internal programme, where he trained over a thousand leaders on one problem: how to drive change when you have responsibility without formal authority. That is the daily reality of anyone trying to start something new inside a large company.
He runs the Marketing Leadership Institute, serves as long-standing leadership dean of the McKinsey and Marketing Academy CMO Fellowship, and is an Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society. An MBA from London Business School sits alongside a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from INSEAD, which is why his keynotes work less as strategy lectures and more as a practical account of how growth actually gets started, championed, and funded inside organisations that would rather play safe.
Key speaking topics
- Finding and acting on new sources of growth
- Growth leadership and organisational entrepreneurship
- Driving change without formal authority
- Why incumbents lose relevance and how to stop it
- Customer-led growth
- Marketing leadership and CMO effectiveness
Ideal for
- Executive teams looking for their next source of growth, not just defending the core
- CEOs and CGOs who want growth owned across the business rather than parked in one function
- CMOs and senior marketers stepping up to broader commercial and board-level roles
- Senior leadership offsites and growth or innovation programmes at large organisations
Audience outcomes
- A clear method for spotting growth opportunities their organisation is currently structured to miss.
- A practical way to get peers and senior leaders to back a growth bet when the lever sits outside your control.
- The behaviours that research links to leaders who move company performance, not just manage their remit.
- A read on how to create permission for sensible risk so good ideas stop dying in committee.
Talks
A keynote on why mature organisations lose relevance and what it takes for senior leaders to bring it back.
Key takeaways:
- The role of senior bravery in keeping incumbent businesses growing.
- Where customer-led innovation stalls inside large companies and how to unblock it.
- A practical view of how growth leaders create permission for risk.
An evidence-based session on the specific behaviours that distinguish high-impact marketing leaders from the rest, drawn from the largest dataset of its kind.
Key takeaways:
- The twelve behaviours that separate CMOs who shift company performance from those who do not.
- How marketing leaders mobilise the boss, peers and team to back commercial priorities.
- Why senior influence, not technical marketing skill, is the binding constraint on a CMO’s impact.
A session for client-facing senior leaders on staying valuable in an AI-saturated advisory market.
Key takeaways:
- Why questions outperform answers as the AI baseline rises.
- How senior advisors build trust that survives the commoditisation of analysis.
- Practical ways to position the advisor role around judgement rather than information.