Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption

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IOUs in the incubation zone must be led by entrepreneurial GMs. A good pool to draw from is ex-CEOs from acquired companies that have successfully navigated a venture trajectory in the past.

Final thing to note here: the language of the book is not always clear. The author uses a number of obscure phrases and sentences that do not really fit into the context. Furthermore, there are cases The fact that financial investors scrutinize these reports so intensely has given rise to the mistaken conclusion that quarterly performance is all shareholders care about, and that therefore Horizon 1 mandates—and by consequence the Performance Zone’s local playbook—should be prioritized above all others. Such an approach, however, leads inexorably to a slow and steady harvesting of the enterprise’s good will and brand power. As mission-critical as this zone is, therefore, it is still only one of four and must be managed to interoperate effectively with the other three for modern business success. The answer becomes self-evident when you read Moore’s book, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s so easy to recommend it. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and so without further ado let’s jump on in and see what Geoffrey A. Moore has to teach us. Zone to Win – Organising to Compete in an Age of DisruptionThe rows must be >10% of the revenue to be taken seriously. As such only things in the performance zone are present here. Fence off the incubation zone. What should be established at this time, on the other hand, is the size of the incubation zone fund and the composition of the venture board that will have governance over it. Most big companies are terrible at this. They try to use the existing go-to-market infrastructure to launch and scale the new innovation. It doesn’t’ work. It creates conflicts of interest with the performance zone. Entry into the incubation zone proper, by contrast, requires making a credible claim to becoming the next big franchise. While I'm not a big reader of business self-help, I was fascinated by the simple but powerful model revealed by Moore. He introduces the concept of four zones that an enterprise must manage:

Solid. A helpful and/or enlightening book, in spite of its obvious shortcomings. For instance, it may offer decent advice in some areas while being repetitive or unremarkable in others. Even if you are not under a current threat of disruption, you need to assume you will be soon and use the intervening period to get yourself into fighting shape.” This chapter starts with an oddly poetic moment in which Moore says the transformation zone “is the mechanism by which an enterprise can free its future from the pull of the past”. He explains, “Initiatives here focus on responding to an emerging wave of secular growth arising out of category disruption. When the disrupted category is adjacent to the core business, established corporations can play offence. When it’s their own category that’s getting disrupted, they must play defence. Either way, the goal is to undertake a transformational initiative to put the enterprise on a new trajectory, one significantly different from the current one.” To play offensive in the transformation zone, Moore suggests taking an independent business unit from the incubation zone and repositioning it as a line of business in the performance zone. Playing defence is even harder, and Moore suggests that there can often be a clash in which your investors’ immediate interests aren’t aligned with your customers’ best interests, which isn’t a sustainable situation. And while all of this is happening, you might find yourself facing disruption from elsewhere in the market. This is another strong analysis of tech industry dynamics and a framework for segregating work within established companies between their core business and new areas of growth and incubation.Second, in parallel, you must turn to your own portfolio of next-generation opportunities to accelerate your own progress toward catching some other wave of disruption emerging in some other category. I’ll skip the performance zone and the productivity zone for now because they are similar to what you’re doing already. The framework just gives them focus, clarity and investment priority. I don’t know how to reconcile that each manager must have a KPI in only one of the four zones, but can manage their own zone as a smaller 4-zone setup. He doesn’t really explain. Shouldn’t those be incompatible? But for the ideas that have the ability to scale, a company should focus on bringing one of those at a time into the business as part of a transformation effort led by the executive team and CEO. Even from such a cursory review of these four zones, it should be clear that their individual goals, objectives, and methods are so diverse that any set of management methods creating success in one zone is likely to cause failure in the other three. That is why it is so important to keep them separate. At the same time, all four need to work in tandem to make the corporation go. Here’s what a successful Zone Offense looks like:

Are you ready to get in the zone? In Geoffrey A. Moore’s Zone to Win, you’ll learn the techniques and the mind-sets you need to know if you want to take an established enterprise and turn it into a super-profitable international business by diversifying your offering and adding new product lines. Managing to Deal with Disrupting Innovation Once Moore! - I saw that this book had been issued earlier and finally got around to reading to see this advance in Moore’s thinking as one of my favorite management authors, e.g. his conceptual frameworks usually add fresh and useful insights into the introduction, management and impact of disruptive innovations. One key thing in this zone is to consider the end of life of bussiness units when it would be better to use the internal resource on something which brings the company more value. The best way is to have an end of life shared service since killing products is a specialist task. Install a governance model that segregates these four zones from one another. In particular, do not let the methods and metrics of the Performance Zone infiltrate the governance of either the Incubation or the Transformation Zone.When you hear someone casually toss out a phrase like “Early Adopter” and everyone in the room knows exactly what that is, you owe Geoffrey Moore’s insight. Few people can describe a market dynamic so clearly and then tell you why you care, why it matters and what you can do about it. The first zone, the "performance zone," is where - except for a complete start-up - most of your money comes from. It is your existing products, relationships, and distribution channels. In the "productivity zone" are the programs and systems which, while they don't directly produce revenue, support the performance zone and make the revenue it produces profitable. Moore suggests that the activities of the productivity zone should be considered largely as _programs_ and _systems_. Systems are continuous and should be funded by corporate; programs should be funded by the entities in the performance zone which expect to use and benefit from them. The productivity zone covers regulatory compliance, efficiency ("doing things right"), and effectiveness ("doing the right things").