Keynote Presentation: Scaling Up With Verne Harnish

Recorded On: 09/16/2026

A leading authority on strategic growth, Verne Harnish has spent more than four decades helping companies translate vision into disciplined execution. Closing out the FEDA conference’s General session, Harnish explained how to apply his 4D framework (drivers, demands, disciplines, and decisions) across the four critical areas of people, strategy, execution, and cash.

Verne Harnish

Founder, Entrepreneur's Organization

Scaling Up

Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with more than 18,000 members worldwide, and founded and chaired for 15 years EO’s premier CEO program held at MIT, a program in which he still teaches today.

Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 290 partners on six continents, Harnish has spent the past four decades helping companies scale up.

He is the author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits; authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times, for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword. He is also the co-author of Scaling Up Compensation and wrote Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) which has been translated into 26 languages and has won eight major international book awards, including the International Book Award for Best General Business book. His latest book is Start to Scale.

Harnish serves on several boards, including as vice chair of The Riordan Clinic, co-founder and chair of Geoversit, and board member of the social venture Million Dollar Women. A private investor in many scale-ups, Harnish enjoys piano, tennis, and magic as a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.