Matthew E. May

Featured Keynote Programs

Secrets to Achieving Maximum Effect With Minimum Means

In this compelling keynote, Matthew reveals how the best leaders spur creativity and innovation among their ranks by imposing intelligent constraints.

The Art of Playing to Win

In this talk, Matthew shows leaders how to begin with a winning aspiration, then answer two deceptively simple questions: Where will you play? and How will you win? Blending compelling examples with stories from years of front-line experience facilitating strategy sessions, this keynote delivers a master class on competing for the future.

How Game-Changers “Think Different”

In this compelling keynote, Matthew takes the audience inside the minds of the world’s most creative executives and entrepreneurs to reveal how they crush the status quo, write their own rules, change the game, and move the world.

Success Through Simplicity

In this thought-provoking exploration of why certain events, products, and people capture our attention and imaginations, Matthew reveals the key to innovative breakthrough in fields ranging from physics and marketing to design and popular culture, and sheds light on the power of simplicity and subtraction in business, work and life, while offering surprising evidence that the best ideas have something missing…on purpose.

Creating a Culture of Constant Innovation

Based on his bestselling book The Elegant Solution, and success in applying the collective wisdom gleaned from nearly a decade of working with Toyota, Matthew offers a vital prescription for organizations seeking new inroads to companywide innovation.

Fixing the 7 Fatal Flaws of Thinking

In this provocative and highly interactive keynote based his book by the same name, Matthew engages audiences in the same simple thought challenge given to over 100,000 people during a 10-year period. Calling on modern neuroscience, psychology, and insight from the world’s most innovative thinkers, he offers a super-curated, field-tested set of “fixes,” proven through hundreds of creative sessions to raise our thinking game.

How do you stand out and stay relevant in a world that is massively distracting and mostly disruptive? It’s a daunting challenge for everyone, no matter their walk in life. In an age of excess everything, success looks different, and now demands a new skill: Subtraction.



Matthew E. May defines subtraction as simply as the art of removing anything excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly—or the discipline to refrain from adding it in the first place. And if subtraction is the new skill to be acquired, we need a guide to developing it. In this keynote, May outlines six simple rules for winning (in business, as well as life) in the age of excess everything, and delivers a single yet powerful idea: When you remove just the right things in just the right way, something very good happens.