Confessions of a Serial Authorpreneur

Read the first chapter in this series

I have been writing business books for the past twenty-five years, always following the same process. I staple myself to a tough problem to which I do not know the answer, and then I simply don’t let go until I have something I believe authentically addresses the case. Crossing the Chasm was the first of these adventures, tackling the challenge of how a start-up could gain a foothold in the mainstream market. It was followed by Inside the Tornado, which addressed how strategy had to change dramatically as one went through the S-curve of a technology adoption life cycle, and The Gorilla Game, which helped investors make sense of the market capitalization dynamics that enveloped technology companies. So far so good.

When the bubble burst, my attention was drawn to the surviving tech companies at the top of the food chain, the ones that were big enough to weather the storm. Here the problem that captured my attention was one that Clay Christensen articulated in 1995 when he wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma. How can established enterprises catch the next wave when there are any number of market forces, both internal and external, that mitigate against their success? My first shot at this was Living on the Fault Line, where I tried to rework managing for shareholder value in light of the lessons learned from the The Gorilla Game. When that didn’t seem to do the trick, I thought the problem might be lack of innovation in established enterprises, and so I wrote Dealing with Darwin illustrating how great companies innovate at every stage of their evolution. But it turned out there was plenty of innovation around, so inability to innovate wasn’t really the problem, and hence the book was not really the solution. Back to the stapler for a third round of attachment, and this led to Escape Velocity, a book about how to free your company’s future from the pull of the past. The good news here was, this time I did get the problem right—the portfolio management theory that is almost universally applied throughout modern business virtually guarantees you will never catch the next wave—but I didn’t offer a sufficiently operational model for how to correct for the problem.

And that brings us to the present, and to you, dear reader, because, absent an intervention, I am going to need some help. Since Escape Velocity came out in 2011, I have been working with a number of Fortune 100 tech companies to construct an operating model that would catch the next wave. That work is now coming to the fore as—wait for it—yes, another book! It is called Zone Offense: A Playbook for Modern Business, and it specifically addresses the operational changes needed to enable an established enterprise to commit to a new category and rapidly scale its business to a size at parity with its existing product lines. If I have this right, it will put the kibosh on the innovator’s dilemma once and for all, and I (and a lot of other people) will be able to sleep better at night.

If.

This is where you come in. Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. By that standard, it is quite possible I might be insane. At what point do persistence and determination become obsession and fixation? And how would one know whether or not one had crossed the line? My answer: Ask!

Specifically, here is my plan. Zone Offense in its present form is a little over 25,000 words, sixty-five pages of manuscript—quite short for a book, especially from someone as loquacious as myself. It is divided into seven chapters of roughly equal length, so each makes for a long—but not interminable—blog post. The seven chapter titles are as follows:

1. A Crisis of Prioritization p. 03
2. The Four Zones p. 08
3. The Performance Zone p. 16
4. The Productivity Zone p. 24
5. The Incubation Zone p. 34
6. The Transformation Zone p. 42
7. Installing the Zone Offense p. 52

My plan is to post a chapter per week on Wednesdays, beginning next Wednesday, in hopes of generating a thread of comments that will a) assure me I am not insane, and b), if that is the case, will help me make this a better book. Now I realize that serializing publication more or less went out of fashion with Dickens, and that it might be easier for some to just download the whole manuscript, but I beg your forbearance here. I want to maximize the amount of feedback people are able to give and be able to assimilate it at the same time. I think this approach will do just that. What I promise in return is, after I have modified the manuscript to incorporate and respond to whatever feedback you provide, I will make it available as a free download from my website. (Then I will go in search of a publisher who may have heard of the freemium business model!)

That’s the plan. Hope I see you next Wednesday.

Read the first chapter in this series

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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win Book | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube