Mike Hayes

Navy SEAL commander and White House Fellow · Managing Director, Insight Partners · Bestselling author of Never Enough and Mission Driven

Inquire to book

Mike Hayes commanded a 2,000-person Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan and led a Fortune 200 company through a $69 billion acquisition. Now he shows your leaders how to build organizations that perform when the plan falls apart.

Leadership Change Management Communication & Influence Organizational Culture

Malden, United States

Videos

Watch Mike in Action

Rev 3 Keynote: Mike Hayes, SEAL Team TWO, VMware

August 2022

Bio

About Mike Hayes

Leadership is tested not in planning sessions but in the moments when the plan falls apart. Few people have faced more of those moments, in more different settings, than Mike Hayes. Over the past three decades he has commanded a 2,000-person Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan, managed a presidential foreign policy crisis from the White House Situation Room, led worldwide operations at VMware through its $69 billion sale to Broadcom, and now deploys capital at Insight Partners, one of the world's leading software investment firms, overseeing a portfolio that spans more than 800 software companies.

As a Navy SEAL officer, Hayes graduated as one of 19 from a training class of 120 and served in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. At the National Security Council, he flew to Moscow to negotiate the START Treaty and led the U.S. government's response to the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, the first major foreign policy crisis of the Obama presidency.

Topics

Mike's Keynote Topics

The leaders who navigate disruption most effectively aren’t always the most technically skilled — they’re the ones who know what they stand for before the pressure hits. Hayes draws on his own major transitions across five careers to build a practical framework for purpose-led leadership at the individual and organizational level. The talk is particularly well suited to organizations navigating transformation, leadership succession, or the challenge of sustaining culture through rapid growth. Audiences leave with a clear process for defining their mission and using it as a decision-making tool when the stakes are highest.

Most organizations can articulate what high performance looks like. Far fewer have a clear model for how to build and sustain it — especially when conditions are changing and pressure is high. Drawing on the three-part framework at the heart of his bestselling book, Hayes explores what elite teams in the military, government, and business actually have in common: a commitment to continuous improvement, the structural agility to adapt without losing cohesion, and a sense of shared purpose that holds people together when things get hard. The examples are drawn from his own experience across all three arenas, and the takeaways are specific enough to apply immediately.

Research & Writing