Philip Lay

Philip Lay Speaker Biography

Change Management and High-Tech
Marketing Strategy Expert

Philip Lay is a strategy advisor to CEOs and management teams. His main focus is to help clients who are struggling to achieve breakout growth, to develop actionable strategies and then execute them effectively. Before retiring in 2012, Philip Lay  was a senior advisor at the Chasm Group (TCG) and had been a part of the Chasm brand ecosystem since 1994. In 2003, eight years after joining TCG as a managing director, Philip co-founded sister firm TCG Advisors together with Geoffrey Moore. He left TCG Advisors almost ten years later in order to reorder his work around five activities: writing, consulting, board membership, teaching business school, and investing in startups. He has now rejoined the firm to help expand TCG’s practice in Europe, as well as continue to work with clients in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Growth Initiatives

Philip advises tech-company CEOs, boards, and management teams in refining corporate, business, and market strategy, coordinating key growth initiatives, coaching sales teams to “create customer budgets” for offers, and maximizing end-customer engagement, mostly aimed at achieving breakout growth in emerging businesses. Like his colleagues, he employs frameworks and models to help clients make challenging decisions in data-poor environments, to maximize their category and market power. He has worked on multiple projects for Autodesk, Compuware, HP, NetApp, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and SAP, in addition to leading well over a hundred strategy projects with mid-sized and smaller public and private companies. Philip is also an experienced keynote speaker and panel moderator.

Publications

Over the years Philip has authored many articles for different trade and other journals. He co-authored “In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers”, a highly successful article published in 2009 by the Harvard Business Review. His thought-provoking online newsletters and blogs, starting in 2000 with Under the Buzz and more recently with his new blog, are highly regarded by tech executives.

Affiliations

Philip serves on the board of Covisint, a $100m. publicly-traded software company that provides a secure cloud engagement platform (PaaS) to help enterprise customers, including major automobile OEMs, pharmaceutical companies and healthcare exchanges, financial services organizations, and transportation and logistics companies, to cooperate effectively with customers, partners, and suppliers. Since late 2009, he has been a visiting professor at IESE business school in Barcelona, Spain, where every April he teaches an elective course on high-tech marketing strategy to full-time MBA students.

Before Chasm Group

Prior to joining Chasm Group in 1994, Philip was co-founder and CEO of a fast-growing security and communications software company, TGR Software; Brazil country manager for Cincom Systems; and national sales and marketing manager for Informatics – all in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He began his career as an account manager with IBM in the UK.

Education

Philip graduated Reading University in the UK with honors in French and History of Fine Arts; and also holds a degree from l’Universite d’Aix-Marseille, in southern France.