Zoning Leadership
Geoffrey Moore
Author, speaker, advisor, best known for Crossing the Chasm, Zone to Win and The Infinite Staircase. Board Member of nLight, WorkFusion, and Phaidra. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute.
Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality
I get tired of listening to “experts” explain how leaders need to be bolder. Usually what they are advocating for is more disruptive innovation, less business as usual. But this completely ignores the impact of context and ends up patronizing behavior that may actually be well-grounded. It depends on which zone you are operating out of.
In the Performance Zone, the goal is to deliver on the quarterly plan. It is not the time or place for disruptive innovation. Leadership means getting your team to the finish line despite whatever roadblocks may crop up. Grit and resourcefulness, combined with attention to tactics, is what is wanted here.
In the Productivity Zone, the goal is to be there for the long haul. Again, disruptive innovation is not on the docket. Analysis and optimization are the keys here, and leaders must be willing to step back, take a systems view of things, and invest in efforts that will enable the Performance Zone to perform better in the future.
By contrast, the Incubation Zone is all about disruptive innovation, and most pundits champion a leadership style that is a perfect fit for this zone. So, if you are in this zone, by all means embrace hypothesis testing, agility, fast failure and the like. Just remember that what works here does not work well in any of the other three zones.
Finally, the Transformation Zone is where the pundits ought to be focusing because transformation is a bear, and no one can ever really tame it. Business lore celebrates the amazing disrupters here—Jobs, Musk, Bezos, etc.—as well we should. But in so doing we should not ignore the amazing disruptees, the leaders who redirected their enterprises to bring them kicking and screaming into a new age—Gerstner, Nadella, Iger, and company. For my money, their leadership style is the single most important one for any aspiring CEO to master.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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Business Lead - Johnson Controls | MBA - IIM Bangalore | Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
1 年Great post !!! Any Matured organisation is likely to have all the 4 zones operating in parallel. Effective leadership is to bring all the zones together cohesively and allocate resources appropriately (typically you would need a diff team dynamics eg productivity vs disruptive new products). Tapping the right resources to gather information around context is crucial skill Also, implementing strategy is relatively complex and baffling compared to developing one. Someone excelled in implementing as per the zone needs is THE biggest MOAT for the organization.
Customer Success | Strategy | Growth | Customer Experience | Ex-Salesforce
1 年Geoffrey Moore love this post! In my experience with transformations, there is always a desire to speed up and land in the productivity or performance zone at a faster pace than is feasible. Even worse when companies measure outcomes of transformation with KPIs fit for the performance zone. What advice would you give leaders to really identify and acknowledge the time, investment and measures needed to take organizations through this zone?
Transformation and Org Design Leader
1 年Good point, every consultant "expert" loves the long ball. It doesn't mean they understand the situation. Then again it doesn't mean senior leaders do either. Often both are off in left field, deep or shallow. Every well founded and grounded decision about how to navigate, often over emphasizes one of three dimensions. 1. Mindset (worldview) 2. Data (Information) 3. Situation (present and future happening) Imbalance = Loosing the plot, and making biased decisions (luck). Balance = A wealth of present and future insight, because behaviors are better aligned to information and situation. Makes a smart play look smart.
Transformation is tough and necessary at times, it takes a lot of courage to go all in - which is really necessary when trying to transform.
VP AI Solution Engineering Australia, People & Technology Leader
1 年Geoffrey Moore love it - any thoughts on how to both balance leadership focus in these areas and how to adjust situationally - I’m taking from your post that a leader ideally needs a constantly altering alchemy of these, not just align to one of them?