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Science of Strategy Institute Websites:
ScienceOfStrategy.com
WarriorClassBlog.com
Strategy-Shop.com
StrategySchool.com
Front-lineStrategy.com
StrategyTrainers.com
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Gary's Speaking Biography
Gary is America's leading speaker on using the classical principles of strategy in modern life, but his experience speaking and performing goes back to his school years when he was trained in speech, debate, and drama.
For a short time after graduation he worked with a comedy group, The Overhead Door, in San Francisco in the early '70s. He brought these skills to his career in sales and marketing, but did not start giving public presentations again until after the publication of his first books on computers in the early '80s. Bantam Books, his publisher, sent him on a radio and television tour to promote his series of computer guides, and he began speaking at the new computer conferences springing up around the personal computer.
He continued both writing and speaking as he grew his software business. Over the years, he gave hundreds of presentations, workshops, and training seminars, and participated in speakers' panels at the regular computer shows in the industry: PC Expo, Compuworld, Unix Expo, Uniforum, and Comdex among them.
As his success in business grew in the '90s (Deloitte Touche's Blue Chip Quality Award, Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year, Inc. magazine's list of fastest-growing companies), Gary's speaking expanded to giving presentations based on his business experience. He began giving presentations, both large and small, on quality and management and the classical strategy of Sun Tzu to a number of private companies, including Boeing, Motorola, GE, KFC, Hewlett Packard, AT&T (several times at the World Partners Conferences) and others. Many of these companies (or divisions of them) later became business partners. As his software business began to focus on supply-chain management, he began giving presentations and developing seminars on reengineering the supply chain based upon his business's work with Motorola, GE, and others in the area.
Internationally, he has spoken at England's Uniforum at the Crystal Palace and at Germany's CeBIT, the largest computer and electronics show in the world. He was flown to Japan to speak at the main conference (several thousand people) of the Japanese Computer Society when his book on client/server computing was published in Japanese. He gave sales training presentations for Jardin's in Hong Kong when they became his company's distributors in Asia, and was given the honor of firing the noontime gun in the harbor.
After leaving the software industry in the late 90's, Gary focused exclusively on training, speaking, and writing books on strategy. Many of his award-winning books, including The Warrior Class: 306 Lessons in Strategy and The Art of War Plus Its Amazing Secrets grew directly out of his corporate presentations. Though his first version of The Art of Sales was done for his software company's salespeople, later version of this work plus his Art of Management and Art of Marketing books came directly from his training work with both corporations and university MBA programs.
As a speaker and trainer, Gary uses a number of skills and techniques to involve his audience. He is skilled at using stories and humor. His latest work, The Golden Key to Strategy, encapsulates many of the stories and jokes he uses in his presentations. He is an expert in the Socratic method of leading a conversation by asking questions of the audience. His presentations use graphics, music, props, and, upon occasion, even costumes. His presentations have been known to steal from Shakespeare's Henry IV and General Patton's address to his army as well as a number of stories taken from his broad knowledge of military and business history.
His proudest accomplishment in speaking is bringing tears to the eyes of a business audience.
When necessary, he also juggles.