Greg McKeown

Greg McKeown is emerging as one of the most refreshing and transformative business thought leaders and speakers on leadership, productivity and business growth. He is the founder and CEO of THIS Inc.—a leadership and strategy design agency in Silicon Valley—a NYT and WSJ best-selling author, and one of the most popular writers for Harvard Business Review and LinkedIn’s Influencer Group.

Greg McKeown’s main message is about Essentialism. This message surfaced from a painful life-lesson learned the day his daughter was born. Caught between the instinctive fatherly desire to stay with his wife and new baby, and the pressures of a demanding job, Greg made the choice to leave the hospital and attend a client meeting. Shortly after the appointment, Greg recognized that he had made a fool’s bargain. He had been untrue to himself, and had let the expectations and schedule of someone else prioritize his life. In trying to keep everyone happy, he had sacrificed what mattered most. That experience gave Greg an inexhaustible obsession to answer the question, “Why is it that otherwise successful people allocate their resources in such a way that they make too little progress in too many directions?”

His research led to the discovery of the “paradox of success” where people, teams, and companies are kept back from breaking through to the next level by their success. Success can lead to the undisciplined pursuit of more. To avoid this, people need to become successful at success. Greg left his job and founded THIS, Inc. to inspire people everywhere to apply these insights. Clients include Apple, Adobe, Google, Facebook, Pixar and Twitter. He co-designed a class at Stanford called, “Designing Life, Essentially.” He was named a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum and wrote what became the New York Times bestseller Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (2014).

McKeown has taught at hundreds of events across the world including in the U.S., Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, China, England, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore and South Africa. Organizations, teams, and individuals have benefited from McKeown’s innovative perspective, which challenges conventional wisdom and defines how to break through to the next level of success and profitability.