BOARD DIRECTOR | ADVISOR | SPEAKER | AWARD WINNING BEST-SELLING AUTHOR
Gary S. Michel is a seasoned CEO, board director, advisor, and bestselling author with nearly 40 years of leadership experience across industrial, commercial, and consumer businesses.
He has led iconic global companies and brands including JELD-WEN, Honeywell, Trane, Club Car, Schlage, and Ingersoll Rand, guiding organizations through growth, transformation, operational improvement, and periods of significant change.
Today, Gary serves on public and private company boards, advises CEOs, founders, investors, and leadership teams, and speaks to organizations around the world on leadership, clarity, simplicity, transformation, and building high-performing organizations.
He is the award-winning bestselling author of deComplify: How Simplicity Drives Stability, Innovation, and Transformation and The Founder’s Mindset: How to Lead with Clarity and Purpose in Any Organization.
Across his board work, advisory relationships, writing, and speaking, Gary brings a practical philosophy shaped by decades of operating experience: cut through complexity, focus on what matters most, and create the clarity and accountability required to deliver meaningful results.
BOOKS BY GARY MICHEL
THE FOUNDER’S MINDSET
Growth creates complexity. Great leaders create clarity.
As organizations grow, focus gets diluted, decisions slow down, and complexity begins to outrun value. In The Founder’s Mindset, bestselling author and transformation leader Gary S. Michel shows leaders how to restore the clarity, ownership, and simplicity that make great organizations work.
Drawing on four decades of leadership experience, Michel introduces a practical framework for leading with a founder’s mindset—whether or not you are the founder.
You’ll learn how to:
- Create Clarity: Align purpose, priorities, principles, plans, and everyday practice.
- Protect the Critical Few: Focus people and resources on what matters most.
- Simplify Execution: Reduce unnecessary complexity and shorten the distance between decisions and action.
- Build Accountability: Create a culture of ownership, judgment, and measurable impact.
- Scale Without Losing Your Edge: Preserve speed, customer connection, and entrepreneurial energy as the organization grows.
The Founder’s Mindset is not about acting like a startup. It is about leading with the clarity, simplicity, and accountability that founders bring when everything is still close to the customer and every decision matters.
deCOMPLIFY
Complexity consumes energy. Simplicity creates capacity.
As organizations grow, layers, processes, meetings, and competing priorities can make it harder to serve customers, develop people, and get important work done. In deComplify, bestselling author and transformation leader Gary S. Michel offers a practical playbook for removing unnecessary complexity and refocusing organizations on what creates real value.
Drawing on decades of leading business transformations, Michel shows how simplicity can strengthen execution, improve alignment, and create the conditions for sustainable performance.
You’ll learn how to:
- Obsess About Customers: Organize decisions and priorities around creating meaningful customer value.
- Focus on What Matters: Eliminate waste, unnecessary work, and complexity that distract from the critical few.
- Field the Right Team: Build capable, engaged teams with the clarity and ownership to perform.
- Own Your Dependencies: Strengthen the partnerships and connections required to deliver results.
- Turn Strategy Into Action: Create alignment, accountability, and disciplined execution throughout the organization.
deComplify is not about doing less for the sake of doing less. It is about removing what gets in the way so people can spend more time on the work that matters most.
GARY’S PHILOSOPHY
People want to buy from, work for, and invest in great companies. To scale that greatness, leaders need radical clarity and uncompromising simplicity. By cutting through operational clutter, you protect your core vision and align purpose directly with high-performance execution.
Transformational Leadership, Delivered.
With nearly four decades of executive experience, CEO, board director, and author Gary S. Michel delivers practical strategies grounded in real operating experience. Bring Gary to your next keynote, workshop, retreat, or advisory session to help your team:
Create Clarity & Alignment: Define purpose, simplify complexity, and unite teams around clear priorities.
Develop Decisive Leaders: Build accountable leaders who make better decisions and drive ownership.
Accelerate Execution & Growth: Eliminate bureaucracy, shorten decision cycles, and deliver sustainable financial performance.
Ways to Engage: Keynotes | Leadership Workshops | Executive Retreats | Board Sessions | Executive Coaching