Geoffrey Moore

Enterprise IT has consolidated around a handful of gorilla vendors, each of which is looking to increase its territory as computing architectures move beyond the current Internet-enabled client-server approach to a future platform built up from modular services and next-generation languages and protocols. Moore outlines each gorilla’s game plan to give CIOs and other interested industry observers an early start in handicapping this race.

Selling disruptive innovations requires a special approach as markets are self-organized to privilege incumbents and exclude challengers. The key is to win over the ever-elusive executive sponsor. Drawing on six years of experience as a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, Moore explains how start-ups have learned to get past the gatekeepers and capture the attention and support of line-of-business executives.

As markets globalize, and current offerings commoditize, more and more companies are looking to changing business models as a source of new competitive advantage. But not all business models can cohabit in the same company. Drawing on recent consulting engagements with leading-edge firms, Moore surveys the landscape of business models and lays out rules of engagement for companies expanding into unexplored territory.

While it is generally acknowledged that company culture has a huge impact on the success of enterprises, there have been few models that help executives understand and leverage culture as part of the management toolkit. Building on the material in his most recent best seller, Living on the Fault Line, Moore lays out models and methods for a no-nonsense approach to the topic that has deep implications for leadership and change management initiatives.

Based on twenty-five years of marketing experience in the high-tech sector, Moore lays out his Marketing Maturity Model, tracing the evolution of a start-up’s marketing from a nice home page to global domination. Along the way he gives audience members a complete set of diagnostics to see where their organization fits in the progression and what elements they might want to focus on next.

The core versus context model is described in chapter two of the book, Living on the Fault Line – 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. 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.

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.