4 Questions for Geoffrey Moore

We had to cancel our Webb Investment Network (WIN) Annual CEO Summit this year, but that didn’t mean we had to forego getting together to exchange ideas. I was delighted and honored to have Geoffrey Moore join me for our first Zoom Fireside Chat. He’s an accomplished business strategist, consultant and the bestselling author of several books, including Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win. I got to know Geoff through our work at Salesforce and he has so much wisdom and an invaluable ability to frame things and give actionable advice. I was grateful that our network of founders, CEOs and executives were able to learn from him. 

Four big questions we asked Geoff:

How we can deal with this body blow we’ve all been hit with called the coronavirus?

Your vision, values and your mission probably hasn’t changed—and shouldn’t have changed—so reaffirming your vision, values and mission is important because that lets you navigate through waters where you’re not sure where the current is leading you. 

Every company needs “a reason to be.” And if your reason to be is still valid, then act in a way that is consistent with it and do the best you can with the limited resources and constraints we are under. As long as you can say, “We’re on our mission, we are maintaining our values,” you can take action. 

You can't succeed in the broader sense that you wanted to before. Reiterate the mission: “Why does the world need this? Why are we doing this?” If you don’t make the focus clear, then people are shooting anything that moves. It won't work. 

What does resetting look like right now?

I’ll bring up a metaphor a venture capitalist once taught me: When all hell breaks loose, what do you do? Do you worry about the horse, the rider or the trail? The horse is the product, the trail is the market, and the rider is the leader. 

Changing the horse means, “We have the right market, we have the right people, we have the wrong product.” 

For most of us right now, the problem might be the trail—and it might not be that this isn’t the right market for us necessarily, but that this is just not the right market for us at this time. 

Sometimes the advice is a change for the rider, and in times like this it’s likely, “slow down.” This is a time for a certain kind of leadership that may be different from the kind of leadership that you teed up before. Remember in The Godfather when Michael Corleone says, “You’re not a war time consigliere, Tom” and he has his father become his consigliere. There are battlefield promotions in times like these.

If you have to pivot, what are you going to pivot to? You want to take action on one—you cannot take action on all three. So, which is most important to make the right changes? Whatever changes you’re going to make, you want to make them now. This does not get better with age. 

How do we come out of this stronger? 

It’s good you’re asking about how to get stronger, rather than asking about how to get results this quarter. That means you are interested in power, not performance in the short term. The business schools are good at teaching you about performance management. They’re not as good at teaching you about power management.

If you've lost power, your performance starts to fall off, so your instinct is to perform your way out of the problem. But performance capability was based on prior inertia, which has been disrupted. So, you now have to reconstruct your power base. The key to company power is to have an ecosystem that is on your side, customers that are on your side. 

To do that you need to get much more local in your focus. Focus primarily on your install base and partners that are closer. Try to get a set of use cases that are particularly pertinent to the current situation. Spend a disproportionate amount of your resources and sales and marketing on those use cases with those customers to make sure they are successful. That is how you build a success platform to go forward. It will be a subset of your total market—it will be like winning a primary in a presidential nomination—it’s not huge but will get you some power to go forward with.

You may want to think, service not product. Do whatever it takes to make your customers successful. It’s not about gross margin or whether this professional service was billable or not billable. It’s were you able to create an impact in this time? If you were, you are going to get credit for it. 

How do we deal with the human piece of this?

It starts with empathy. Go back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The bottom is safety and security. That is the focus of the state of California right now. How do you get back to work, how do you do this in a safe and secure way? Every airline is thinking through their process for reassuring, every restaurant will too—this will go on for a long time. Honor the need for safety and security, you can't be cavalier about it.

The next thing is belonging or affiliation. Re-establish your sense of community, including customers and partners. Even if you have to lay people off, they’re part of your community. We are one community, we’re going forward together, we have each other's backs. We have painful constraints, there are things we can't control, but we can control how we communicate and we can have respect for each other. 

Next is achievement or accomplishment. Set up your achievement culture to achieve things that are achievable. Build them around local positions of power that are valuable. Sub-segment your world into highly powerful segments.

At the top of the hierarchy is self-actualization. What's beyond making money for your team and shareholders? Every corporation is in service to the world. How do you find your role in being of service? In a crisis we can bring that best self to work. We can make a contribution to everybody around us.