Geoffrey Moore is the Chairman, Founder and Managing Partner of TCG Advisors (TCG-A), a consulting practice that provides marketing strategy and organizational services to many leading high-technology companies as well as to those in other sectors. Moore is also a Venture Partner with Mohr, Davidow Ventures, a California-based venture capital firm specializing in specific technology markets, including e-commerce, internet, enterprise software, networking and semiconductors. In this latter role, as a venture partner at a leading "VC" firm, he provides market strategy advice to their high-tech portfolio companies.
Mr. Moore's most recent book, Living on the Fault Line was published in a revised edition in the summer of 2002. This edition focuses on managing for shareholder value in any economy including the current "age of anxiety." In line with this focus, Geoffrey Moore's current practice is focused around the Fault Line methodology and his specialty is presenting and analyzing the core versus context model described in chapter two - core being anything that contributes directly to competitive differentiation and leads to customer preference in purchase decisions. Context is everything else - all the things that you or your company or product must do to pass muster but which do not differentiate you from others in the same market. Likewise, the key lesson for investors is that the New Economy, with the help of the Internet, enables companies as never before to outsource their context in order to focus on their core enterprises.
Geoffrey Moore has written three other books. Perhaps most notably, he is the author of Crossing the Chasm, one of the most influential business books of the twentieth century, in which he introduces readers to a gap or "chasm" which innovative companies and their products must cross in order to reach the lucrative mainstream market. As a follow-up, Moore's second book, Inside the Tornado, provides readers with insight into how to capitalize on the potential for hypergrowth beyond the chasm, detailing the need for radical shifts in market strategy and prescribing appropriate tactics for succeeding in each stage of the cycle. The Gorilla Game is Geoffrey Moore's third book, which he co-authored with The Chasm Group managing partner and high-tech marketing strategist Tom Kippola, and stock investment guru and BancAmerica Robertson Stephens analyst Paul Johnson. It offers readers a coherent approach to high-tech investing and understanding of how to build a solid investment strategy around purchasing and holding stocks of what authors call "gorilla" companies.
Prior to founding The Chasm Group in 1992 and TCG Advisors in 2003, Moore was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high-tech marketing strategy and marketing communications company. For the decade prior, he was a sales and marketing executive at three different software companies.
Geoffrey Moore holds an undergraduate degree in literature from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He also served as an English professor at Olivet College.
Escape Velocity addresses a “power deficit” in established enterprises that holds them captive to their legacy franchises and renders them unable to capitalize on next-generation opportunities. Moore traces this deficit to a performance-oriented management culture that drives accountability for financial results without establishing equivalent responsibility for replenishing competitive advantage. In this context enterprises continually draw down their reserves of power to fuel the current quarter’s results while failing to stake out future positions of power to drive next-generation growth. Moore’s analysis shows this behavior is deeply embedded in the established norms and practices of global businesses and that a new set of frameworks and disciplines are required to correct for it.
Escape Velocity organizes this material around a “framework of frameworks” Moore calls the Hierarchy of Powers. This is comprised of five types of power, all of which must be aligned to achieve escape velocity. They are:
Category Power, achieved through proactively entering and exiting categories to participate meaningfully in the highest growth opportunities;
Company Power, achieved through highly asymmetrical allocations of resources to create “unmatchable” core capabilities;
Market Power, achieved through targeting the most strategic customer segments and skewing offers and programs to ensure winning dominant shares in each;
Offer Power, achieved through disentangling three distinct forms of innovation one from another, managing each separately, to achieve differentiation, competitive neutralization, and internal productivity respectively; and
Execution Power, with specific attention on transformational initiatives that realign the company around the next-generation capabilities required to execute its strategy.
Moore pulls no punches as he draws on his twenty years of experience advising high-tech management teams to call out the misconceptions and behaviors that trap enterprises into decaying franchises, and he is adamant about the responsibility of executive management to reverse such trends. At the same time, he is empathetic about the challenges involved and highly pragmatic about how best to meet them.
Drawing on his best-selling books, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, Moore traces the path markets take through the Technology Adoption Life Cycle and explains what vendors must do to succeed at each stage.
Caught between the Darwinistic forces of globalization and commoditization, and the demon of corporate inertia, established enterprises are increasingly challenged to innovate. Moore leverages his life cycle models to outline a broad range of innovation strategies and align them with a category’s current stage of market development.
When processes no longer result in marketplace differentiation, they go from being core to context, but all too many continue to consume the bulk of an enterprise’s resources. Building on the material in his most recent best seller, Living on the Fault Line, Moore explains how the resulting decline in revenues and margins can be overcome through aggressive resource reallocation and human capital renewal.