Geoffrey Moore is a very
successful author and has also started multiple consulting and speaking
businesses. He is also a partner in a
venture capital firm. Mr. Moore writes extensively
about strategy and marketing, particularly in technology markets.
In Escape Velocity Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past Mr. Moore sets up circumstances in which businesses struggle with a transition from existing products and services to the products and services that will replace them.
Overall, I would describe this as a useful management book. More relevant for tech space readers, and most relevant for B2B tech space readers.
In Escape Velocity Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past Mr. Moore sets up circumstances in which businesses struggle with a transition from existing products and services to the products and services that will replace them.
I have two quick observations:
first, this book is clearly about business-to-business marketing. If you are in the B2B space, there are some
lessons here, but this book clearly is not aimed at you. Second, since Mr. Moore is involved with tech
companies, his examples are almost exclusively tech examples. Not so narrow as not to be interesting, but
perhaps limited for readers who are in, say, insurance or construction.
Moore’s theme is that there is
a hierarchy of strategy, which he labels powers. (It is my interpretation that these are
strategy equivalents). Specifically and
in order: Category Power, Company Power, Market Power, Offer Power and
Execution Power. He sets up his argument
with examples of enterprises where strong legacy products exist and the
enterprise gets the majority of its cash flow from those. Some more forward-thinking members of the
firm envision the next generation product and begin scratching for resources to
advance those. In his view as presented
in this book, far too many firms are too reluctant or at least too slow to free
up the best people and adequate capital to support the new. The old-world firm that I would point to as
the exemplar of the opposite is Gillette, which has steadily and relentlessly
pushed its lead in razors and razor blades, cannibalizing the old product.
The chapters after the set-up
describe each of the five “powers” with prescriptions on how to fight
organization inertia and obtain adequate funding to identify the most promising
new products and harvest the old.
Overall, I would describe this as a useful management book. More relevant for tech space readers, and most relevant for B2B tech space readers.
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