Author Archives: Geoffrey Moore

About Geoffrey Moore

Geoffrey A. Moore is an author, speaker and business advisor to many of the leading companies in the high-tech sector, including Cisco, Cognizant, Compuware, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and Yahoo! Best known for Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win with the latest book being The Infinite Staircase. Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute

Accelerating Change in Consumer Packaged Goods

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Accelerating Change in Consumer Packaged Goods

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

I had the pleasure of engaging with a team of executives from a Global 2000 Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company, and as always from such encounters, I learned something new.

The team is focused on accelerating change, and I was sharing with them the zone management model, and how each zone is intended to keep a characteristic pace. The Productivity Zone, by design, goes the slowest because its job is to take extra time in order to reduce risk and cost. The Incubation Zone, again by design, goes the fastest because its job is to take extra risk and pretty much ignore cost in order to reduce time.

What the team made me realize is that, given all the change coming at them (and, yes, we had been talking a lot about Generative AI and related technologies), they needed their Productivity Zone to speed up, come what may. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is not just a single CPG enterprise talking. Every Volume Operations enterprise at its core runs on processes. There is no other way to operate at scale, which means the Performance Zone is completely dependent on them. But here’s the thing—all those mission-critical processes are invented, maintained, and improved by the Productivity Zone.

So, here’s the challenge in a nutshell: How can you possibly speed up something that is inherently designed to go slow? Or, to make the goal more specific, how do you incubate a truly disruptive process and then, at the right moment, use it to transform your most conservative organizations?

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear me advocate for aligning the zone management framework with the Technology Adoption Life Cycle as a roadmap for how best to navigate these waters. Here’s how it plays out in four acts:

  1. Act One: Incubate, focusing on early adopters who are looking to explore the opportunities, leveraging a project model. You intend to prove the feasibility of the new process, and you will do whatever it takes to do so. Your goal is to show what good could look like while at the same time taking technical risk off the table, leaving adoption risk as the primary remaining challenge.
  2. Act Two: Transform, focusing exclusively on a single underperforming function led by pragmatists in pain, leveraging a solution model. You intend to use the breakthrough technology to completely revamp the process in question, taking it from underperforming to stellar. Your goal is to create a credible set of references to support your transition to Act Three.
  3. Act Three: Perform, focusing first on processes adjacent to those addressed by Act Two, ones that are performing adequately but could definitely be improved, led by pragmatists who are reluctant to change until they see others go first. You intend to create a groundswell of adoption that will convert their reluctance to change into a fear of missing out. Your goal is to lead with a “killer app,” highlighting whatever portion of your technology that can deliver a quick win, and then follow that up with a complete roll-out.
  4. Act Four: Secure, focusing on the revamped process end to end, monitoring quality from final deliverable back through each step, working with process managers who will be maintaining their portion of the new system. You intend to continuously improve following a data-driven approach supplemented with whatever analytics and AI can provide. Your goal is to operate at scale with unprecedented productivity and agility.

The key point of this framework is that it is linear. You take it one act at a time, and you do not skip over any acts. Your key metric is time to complete, both at the level of each act and of the whole play. With respect to anything transformational, know that most people appreciate it may take more than one year, and no one will give you three years. So you have a maximum of eight quarters to get to Act Four (which will be ongoing thereafter).

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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Are Humans Just a Fleshy Generative AI Machine?

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Are Humans Just a Fleshy Generative AI Machine?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

By now you have heard that GenAI’s natural language conversational abilities are anchored in what one wag has termed “auto-correct on steroids.” That is, by ingesting as much text as it can possibly hoover up, and by calculating the probability that any given sequence of words will be followed by a specific next word, it mimics human speech in a truly remarkable way. But, do you know why that is so?

The answer is, because that is exactly what we humans do as well.

Think about how you converse. Where do your words come from? Oh, when you are being deliberate, you can indeed choose your words, but most of the time that is not what you are doing. Instead, you are riding a conversational impulse and just going with the flow. If you had to inspect every word before you said it, you could not possibly converse. Indeed, you spout entire paragraphs that are largely pre-constructed, something like the shticks that comedians perform.

Of course, sometimes you really are being more deliberate, especially when you are working out an idea and choosing your words carefully. But have you ever wondered where those candidate words you are choosing come from? They come from your very own LLM (Large Language Model) even though, compared to ChatGPT’s, it probably should be called a TWLM (Teeny Weeny Language Model).

The point is, for most of our conversational time, we are in the realm of rhetoric, not logic. We are using words to express our feelings and to influence our listeners. We’re not arguing before the Supreme Court (although even there we would be drawing on many of the same skills). Rhetoric is more like an athletic performance than a logical analysis would be. You stay in the moment, read and react, and rely heavily on instinct—there just isn’t time for anything else.

So, if all this is the case, then how are we not like GenAI? The answer here is pretty straightforward as well. We use concepts. It doesn’t.

Concepts are a, well, a pretty abstract concept, so what are we really talking about here? Concepts start with nouns. Every noun we use represents a body of forces that in some way is relevant to life in this world. Water makes us wet. It helps us clean things. It relieves thirst. It will drown a mammal but keep a fish alive. We know a lot about water. Same thing with rock, paper, and scissors. Same thing with cars, clothes, and cash. Same thing with love, languor, and loneliness.

All of our knowledge of the world aggregates around nouns and noun-like phrases. To these, we attach verbs and verb-like phrases that show how these forces act out in the world and what changes they create. And we add modifiers to tease out the nuances and differences among similar forces acting in similar ways. Altogether, we are creating ideas—concepts—which we can link up in increasingly complex structures through the fourth and final word type, conjunctions.

Now, from the time you were an infant, your brain has been working out all the permutations you could imagine that arise from combining two or more forces. It might have begun with you discovering what happens when you put your finger in your eye, or when you burp, or when your mother smiles at you. Anyway, over the years you have developed a remarkable inventory of what is usually called common sense, as in be careful not to touch a hot stove, or chew with your mouth closed, or don’t accept rides from strangers.

The point is you have the ability to take any two nouns at random and imagine how they might interact with one another, and from that effort, you can draw practical conclusions about experiences you have never actually undergone. You can imagine exception conditions—you can touch a hot stove if you are wearing an oven mitt, you can chew bubble gum at a baseball game with your mouth open, and you can use Uber.

You may not think this is amazing, but I assure you that every AI scientist does. That’s because none of them have come close (as yet) to duplicating what you do automatically. GenAI doesn’t even try. Indeed, its crowning success is due directly to the fact that it doesn’t even try. By contrast, all the work that has gone into GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned AI) has been devoted precisely to the task of conceptualizing, typically as a prelude to planning and then acting, and to date, it has come up painfully short.

So, yes GenAI is amazing. But so are you.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Google Gemini

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Making Ring-fenced Funding Work

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Toughest Challenge Series: Episode 2

Making Ring-fenced Funding Work

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Inspired by the HP Incubations Team

Here’s the challenge. Everyone gets that you need to ring-fence funding for incubating Horizon 3 initiatives. At the corporate level, with the CEO’s direct sponsorship, this can be managed as a separate operating unit with its own budget. The challenge is when the incubation is nested. That means it is being funded out of the operating budget of a Performance Zone business unit, not from some special set-aside allocation.

Nested incubation represents the majority of internally funded Horizon 3 investments. (M&A is a different vehicle, funded out of capex not opex, and is not subject to the challenges we will discuss here). The reason there is a strong preference for nested incubations is that, if successful, they are of immediate interest to the business unit’s current customer base as well as its partner ecosystem. That is, while there can be high technical risk, there is little to no market risk. That said, it is still early days, the technology is not proven, product-market fit still needs to be determined, so it is in no position to generate ROI in the current fiscal year.

The challenge comes to the fore in a tough year where the corporation has to cut back on its operating expenses. Everybody is expected to take a haircut, tighten their belts, suck it up, and carry on. The problem is, when it comes to managing incubations, this simply does not work. Incubation is all about getting and maintaining momentum. If at any point you take your foot off the accelerator, you will lose momentum, and you will never get it back. Instead, you will salvage what you can from the R&D and write the whole thing off to bad timing. But let’s be clear: this is not management, this is mismanagement.

So, what’s the fix? It starts with the business unit surfacing its incubation opportunity during the annual budgeting process. It proposes to set aside a portion of its next year’s budget dedicated to funding the incubation, with funding released on a VC-model based on milestone attainment. This is documented and agreed to at the Executive Leadership Team level. If bad times hit, the choice is never to take a haircut; it is either to carry on or cancel things altogether, and it is made in dialog with the ELT since either way it could have a material impact on the enterprise’s market valuation.

Once the nested incubation has been agreed to, then the business unit leader is responsible for ensuring its funding stays ring-fenced. In particular, this means that resources assigned to the incubation effort cannot be “borrowed” by the current product lines to temporarily address an urgent need. Again, this is all about maintaining momentum.

To ensure this works as planned, here is a tip from a long-time friend and colleague who is the CFO at a major enterprise:

All ring-fenced items are documented and agreed upon at the ELT level. The way it works is the finance team who work with the budget holder is the guardian of all ring-fenced spend. When changes need to be made, they can’t touch ring-fenced spend. Of course, you have to limit the number of ring-fenced items to give freedom of execution to the leaders, but it’s an effective mechanism.

That’s what he thinks. And that’s what I think too. What do you think?

Image Credit: Google Gemini

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VC-Backed Firms in Regulated Industries

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The Times They Are A-Changin’

VC-Backed Firms in Regulated Industries

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

This week I have had conversations with executive teams of VC-backed firms working in three different regulated industries: Healthcare, Telco, and Financial Services. All of them reported that their sales pipelines were around 3X what they were a year ago. We didn’t dig into why, although I expect that it means the incumbent providers are under increasing pressure to modernize their operating models and streamline their infrastructure models to meet customer demand and pricing pressure.

The reason we did not get to discuss why this is happening is that each of the teams was more focused on how — how do we adapt our playbook to this new development? You might not think an upsurge in demand would be a problem, but all three of these firms are at least an order of magnitude sub-scale to properly address the demands of their target customers. How do you ride such a wave demand without wiping out? How do you scale and not break your company?

Understanding the Dynamics of the Situation

The easiest way to see what is going on here is to examine it through the lens of the Hierarchy of Powers. Here’s how it plays out:

  • Category Power. The category is shifting from resisting the next wave to embracing it, albeit reluctantly, because the status quo is deteriorating, and it is clear something has to change. This leads to the upsurge in RFPs and RFIs that each company is now seeing. Budget is being created whereas before it had to be scrounged. This is great news for each enterprise, but it has its challenges.
  • Company Power. Compared to the Tier 1 prospects each of these companies is targeting, their own is tiny indeed. All of them lack the global reach and depth of personnel their customers require. Nonetheless, these are their most valuable prospects, so they must find a way to engage. That’s the core of the challenge.
  • Market Power. Each company has already focused on a single vertical—that is how they got as far as they have. Now they are going to have to focus even more rigorously in order to control their exposure to too much demand coming at them too fast and too soon. To secure market power, to become the go-to vendor for their category of offer for this vertical, they must prioritize the right subset of prospects and do whatever it takes to get them over the line.
  • Offer Power. This is where each company shines. It is why they are each attracting the attention of companies that a year ago were not returning their calls. Their products, however, are highly complex, and the implementations even more so, so they cannot support runaway growth. Moreover, the regulated industries they serve impose rigorous, one might even say onerous, demands, creating a whole series of hoops to jump through before they can get to the other side. How do you “catch the wave” when the sign on the beach says “proceed with caution”?
  • Execution Power. At the end of the day, this is the crux of the challenge. How can a subscale company with a world-class offer meet the demands of a regulated industry dominated by behemoth enterprises? How should it adapt its playbook?

Adapting the Playbook

Given this change in dynamics, here are the kinds of adaptions that are called for:

  • Control your destiny by narrowing your focus. The key for all three enterprises is to win a handful of Tier 1 accounts that the rest of the industry looks to for best practices. Winning these accounts will establish them as the go-to choice for the industry as a whole. This objective trumps all others, and every organization inside the company needs to reprioritize its workload accordingly.
  • Hold fast to your priorities. This is an internal transformation that requires strict discipline to execute. In the past, it was OK to step off the path to address an impromptu request because the demand for everyone’s time was less insistent. Now it is not. Use weekly commits as a way to make workloads visible, and intervene whenever they are drifting off course.
  • Stay very focused on your top-tier target accounts. Every one of them is a priority, even when they may not be giving you all the reception you want. Conversely, all other prospects are a distraction even when they are inviting you in.
  • Continue to serve your existing customer base. These are not the Tier 1 players we are targeting, but they are references that can help win those accounts. In addition, they are the early adopters who put their faith in you. You must do right by them.
  • Align with a big friend. Your target customers need you to bring many more resources to the table than you have inside your company. The good news is that these same customers work with global service providers who specialize in helping them on-board next-generation offers. You need to secure strong support from at least one of these, and you probably cannot easily support more than one, so pick one you think you can trust, and go all in with them on your go-to-market planning.
  • Let the big friend help you clear your regulatory hurdles. Time is your scarcest resource, and unfortunately, regulated industries are not good at moving swiftly. It’s a mismatch in operating models. VC-backed companies take risks to save time; regulated industries take time to reduce risk. This is not something you are well positioned to deal with. Global services firms, on the other hand, already have relationships with the regulatory authorities you must interface with, not to mention the bandwidth to work through the mandated processes. Do whatever you can to get their help in expediting whatever needs to be done.
  • Create the solution playbook that you and your GSI friend will co-deliver. Do not let the GSI take over the implementation. You know a lot more about what it takes to make your solution work than they do. But you can make sure that the work is profitable for them by giving them the playbook and letting them bill for their time. You don’t need the services revenue anywhere near as much as you need the Tier 1 account win.
  • Defer inbound requests that take you off strategy. You don’t have to say no. You just have to say, not yet. Given the amount of stress that any Tier 1 engagement will put on your firm, taking even one account that is off-script risks breaking your camel’s back.
  • Defer inbound interest around an acquisition. You are at an inflection point in value creation that is potentially extraordinary, the very outcome you and your investors have been preparing for. This is not the time to let go of the reins, particularly if they are going to get handed to an established enterprise whose culture is likely to clash with yours. Moreover, you cannot afford the distraction of all the due diligence that M&A discussions necessarily entail. M&A cannot solve your Tier 1 problem. You have to do that yourself.

Now, to be clear, there are exceptions that could overrule any one of the prescriptions above, so each team needs to review them in light of its own history and circumstances. The key point is that when the market is shifting from a state of scarcity to one of abundance, there is a short time window to catch that wave. The large competitors cannot move fast enough to do this themselves — that is why they are interested in making an acquisition. You are agile enough to do so, but you are painfully subscale — hence the need for the somewhat drastic prescriptions above. Navigating this part of the journey is tricky, but if you stay focused on winning (and keeping!) a handful of Tier 1 accounts, you are making the best bet.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Google Gemini

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Capitalizing on Disruptive Innovations

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Capitalizing on Disruptive Innovations

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

In Silicon Valley, we are in love with disruptive innovations, largely because we make a lot of them and have profited exceedingly well from so doing. But for anyone on the receiving end, the relationship is not so rosy. Yes, the potential for gain is extraordinary, but the path to getting there is strewn with attempts that have fallen far short of the hype. How can one engage responsibly with this sort of opportunity? Here’s a framework that can help.

Capitalizing on Disruptive Innovations Stairway to Heaven Framework

There are four proven ways to capitalize on disruptive innovation, and they are organized here in terms of escalating risk and reward. Each stair appeals to a different persona in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, the bottom one attracting conservatives, the second, pragmatists in pain, the third, pragmatists with options, and the fourth, visionaries. Each stair can be managed to its targeted reward, but it is very hard indeed to manage two or more stairs in tandem. Most failures occur because management is not decisive about which gains it is committed to achieving and in what priority order it should be served. Needless to say, there is a better way.

The first use of this framework is to explore the possibilities of each stair for your enterprise. That is, if you were to prioritize this stair, what would success look like, how would you expect to measure it, and what costs and risks would be entailed? You want to talk this through as a team, ensuring everyone gets heard. Specifically, you want to make sure that the adoption personas of the most powerful people in the room do not dominate this part of the dialog. They are likely going to make the call in the end, but it is critical that they hear everyone out before they do.

Let’s try this out with everyone’s latest favorite example—generative AI. Imagine you are a member of the executive team at a pharmaceutical corporation, and you have charged your IT team to come up with a GenAI strategy. Wisely, they have come back to you with an array of options, arranged in a stairway to heaven. Here’s what they might say:

  • Automate. There is a whole series of regulatory compliance obligations that today we outsource overseas to be serviced by a lower-waged workforce. Not only would automating these tasks reduce our costs, it would also lower the error rate and continuously improve performance as more and more machine learning is put to work. This is a low-risk, modest-return option. There would be no disruption to any of our other operations, and we in IT could learn a lot about a technology that is mutating far faster than anything we have ever seen before.
  • Reengineer. Our proteomics research scientists are having a real problem with the combinatorial explosion of all the possible 3D configurations a given 2D sequence of amino acids might adopt. By focusing our generative AI models on just this one problem, we can vastly accelerate our discovery phase, transforming our problem set from completely intractable to continuously improving. This is a medium-risk, high-return opportunity that is confined to a single department, thereby minimizing disruption to the rest of our value chain.
  • Modernize. Our go-to-market teams are competing for smaller and smaller slices of time from the physician offices they call upon. We need relevant messaging to get the appointment and highly personalized content to get buy-in from both the doctors and the nurses. Today we rely on experience and anecdotal data, which works OK for our long-tenured members but makes recruiting, onboarding, and ramping a nightmare. By focusing our Large Language Model on all the data in our CRM systems, combined with all our data from the labs, clinical trials, patent submissions, as well as the patient records we have access to, we can arm our GenAI with more information than any one human could process. We still will have humans in the loop to monitor and adapt this material throughout the sales process, but they will be much better equipped to compete than ever before. This is a high-risk, high-return opportunity that will impact a large portion of our workforce, so we plan to stage the implementation to capture learnings as we go.
  • Innovate. Deep Mind’s AlphaGo program taught itself to play go at the highest level by playing against itself millions and millions of times. We think we can take a similar approach to drug discovery. It’s a moon-shot idea, and our data scientists are still in their own discovery phase, but this could be a game-changer for the industry. We’d like to take a VC approach to funding this effort, ring-fencing the funding across several years, but holding ourselves accountable to meeting material milestones along the way.

As you can see, there is a case to be made for each stair, but there is only so much time, talent, management attention, and working capital to go around, so it is critical that the executive team prioritize these four options and sequence them appropriately. Different teams will come up with different priorities. You are not looking for the “right answer.” You are looking for the one that will yield the best risk-adjusted returns for your enterprise under current conditions.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Geoffrey Moore, Google Gemini

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Dualism is Bunk – Emergentism Rules!

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Dualism is Bunk - Emergentism Rules!

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Readers of The Infinite Staircase (who are not many but whom I highly esteem) will know that it describes reality as constituted not of two but rather of eleven separate levels. At the bottom of the staircase is physics, all matter, no mind. At the top is theory, all mind, no matter. But there are nine layers in between, and here is the amazing thing. Each one is not only distinctly separable from the one above and below it, it is also defined by what I will call a characteristic attribute.

Now, getting that characteristic attribute right is no small feat, so consider the following a first cut at something that undoubtedly can be improved upon. (Start at the bottom and work your way up the staircase.)

OK, I am not crazy about the word imitational, but setting that aside, this list specifies an amazing amount of structure in a relatively confined space. All the italicized words represent fruitful fields of study in themselves, and taken together might constitute a Masters Degree in Reality.

Needless to say, every one of these claims is debatable, so let me just close by saying,

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Geoffrey Moore

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Allocating Resources to Solve Horizon 2

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Another Tough Challenge

Allocating Resources to Solve Horizon 2

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

We’ve known about this problem forever—how do you find a principled way to allocate budget across three different horizons of ROI.

  • Horizon 1 pays off in the current year and equates to the funding needed for you to make your operating plan and meet or beat investor guidance.
  • Horizon 3 pays off downstream, typically by making a speculative bet on an emerging category or market that would come to fruition in the out years. Since it is still early days, these bets are relatively small and can be measured by and managed to venture milestones.
  • Horizon 2 is the troublemaker. It calls for a material investment in gaining power in the near term in order to compete effectively in the mid-term. That investment will come out of Horizon 1, either from the Performance Zone trying to make the number or from the Productivity Zone trying to supply the needed support to do so, and most likely both.

In short, both internally and externally, Horizon 2 investments are not popular, even though everyone recognizes that they are critical to long-term success. So what is the process by which one can do right by them?

The key is to recognize that the ROI from Horizon 2 is measured in units of power, whereas that from Horizon 1 is measured in units of performance, and that the two must not be mixed. Now, to be clear, performance creates the funding for power, and power creates the foundation for performance, so they are deeply intertwined. But each has its own metrics of success, and the time lag between them says they cannot be blended.

Power always precedes performance. To underfund power is to jeopardize your future performance, the ultimate result being the liquidation of your franchise. To underfund performance, on the other hand, is to jeopardize the cash flow that you need to fund power, putting your market cap at risk, the ultimate result being to attract an activist investor who will oversee the liquidation of your franchise. There is no safe path to take, only a precarious middle way to traverse.

Now, again to be fair, in good times when your category is enjoying secular growth, you get to have your cake and eat it too. That is, you produce amazing cash flow, have a fabulous market cap, and have resources aplenty to invest as you choose. My colleagues still refer to the period leading up to the first tech bubble as “ the time of the great happiness.” Be that as it may, for most of us in 2024 (our friends in GenAI being a notable exception), this is not such a year. We have to make tough choices, and we have to make them now.

So, back to process — and CFOs, take note because you’re likely the one to be leading it.

  1. Separate strategic planning from annual budgeting by at least one quarter.
  2. Charge each business unit to pitch a strategic plan that would create returns substantially above and beyond their current operating model. Included in this plan is a ballpark estimate of the funding that would be required to implement it.
  3. Facilitate an Executive Leadership Team review of the overall portfolio of opportunities, culminating in a rank-ordered list.
  4. Consult with the CEO to determine how much of next year’s operating budget can be allocated to strategic investments, and in that context, which investments should be prioritized for funding. This funding will be allocated in advance of the operational budgeting and ring-fenced to ensure it is spent as intended.
  5. Most strategic investments will be funded as nested incubations, meaning they will be managed within an existing business unit, and are funded as part of their operating budget. However, you must insist that these efforts be isolated, measured, and accounted for separately from the core business, as they are intended to deliver power outcomes, not performance outcomes, and need to be held accountable to different success metrics. (If you do not do this, their operating budget funds will drift away to supplement Horizon efforts to make the number, and the strategic initiative will falter for lack of sufficient investment.)
  6. Truly disruptive incubations, on the other hand, need to be funded outboard of the current business unit structure, in a corporate Incubation Zone, governed by an Incubation Zone board managing a ring-fenced Incubation Zone fund, following the operating model of venture capital. This is covered in detail in Zone to Win.
  7. At this point budgeting can turn its attention to Horizon 1 and how best to allocate funding to hit the current year’s financial targets.

This process solves for two perennial missteps in annual budgeting. The first we might call “the leftovers approach.” First, you allocate all the resources needed to make your Horizon 1 commitments, and then you look to what’s left to fund strategic initiatives. There will be some resources in the kitty, but not as much as there could be since Horizon 1 managers want to reserve some contingency funding. The result is a bias toward modest investing in incremental innovations that do not create future power but rather extend the current footprint.

The second misstep we can call “the variable approach.” Here you allocate half the resources at the beginning of the year and make the second half allocation contingent upon meeting the Horizon 1 plan for that period. The problem here is that strategic initiatives require sustained investment throughout their time in the J-curve. If you flinch and pull back at any point, you lose momentum, never to be regained. This is a big advantage venture-backed companies have over in-house efforts and one of the reasons why VCs love to invest in a downturn.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Tackle Your Toughest Challenge This Year

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Tackle Your Toughest Challenge This Year

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

This is the first in what I hope to be an extended series of blogs focused on a single topic: What is the toughest challenge your company faces today, and what would it take to overcome it? I’ve reached out to my network, so I have a few good ones to start with, but needless to say, I would be very interested to learn what you are up against in your enterprise. In the meantime, here is my first shot on goal:

“I think we had stopped innovating for a long time. Customers were disappointed. But over the past few years, we have made massive improvements to our products. In fact, many who use the products feel like they are best in class. Our big challenge is getting the market to recognize that we are not the company we were a decade ago. This tends to be very easy to accomplish in small pockets but is a huge challenge at scale.”

There is a whole cohort of global enterprises that are facing this conundrum, including the iconic enterprise tech companies that rode the client-server/Internet wave to become the great growth stocks of the 1990s, who then became overshadowed by the massive mobile/cloud wave that has driven consumer tech successes in this century, and who are now institutional, single-digit-growth anchor holdings in today’s value investors’ portfolios. What would it take to free their future from the pull of the past?

The answer comes in two parts. First, they have to participate in a wave of disruptive innovation that is inside the tornado, with AI and ML being likely current candidates. They don’t have to be the first mover or even the category leader, but they do have to gain a substantial share of some piece of the pie, enough for the world to see they are a real player and that their growth prospects have therefore materially changed. This is something that can — indeed must — be powered by internal forces, management committing to the risk, engineering committing to the task, go-to-market committing to the sales, and everyone competing like crazy to get enough share to be taken seriously.

This is a big deal in itself, but not as the quote above makes clear, the toughest challenge. Instead, it creates the toughest challenge, which is how to get the world to acknowledge and buy into the good work that has been done and that is continuing to be done. Specifically, the challenge is how to change the narrative.

Narratives are how we make sense of the world. They are the stories we tell about ourselves, our friends, our enemies, the products we use, the causes we participate in — you name it, if we have any stake in it, we tell stories about it. These stories circulate, and after a while, they become institutionalized as received wisdom or established reputation or brand image. As with “your father’s Oldsmobile,” everybody knows that so-and-so is such-and-such, without anyone giving it much thought. These narratives become signposts along the road of life. We expect them to stay the same. And that, of course, is what makes them so hard to change.

To change the narrative you need a forcing function. This has to be external to your enterprise, something that causes the world to reorient itself, and in so doing, to realize that its old signposts may no longer serve. In tech, we have been blessed with a plethora of forcing functions, something Joseph Schumpeter taught us to call “waves of creative destruction.” Such waves radically alter the allocation of budgets, and in so doing, they run roughshod over the old highways along with any of their signposts. To change your narrative, you have to position your enterprise in their path.

Satya Nadella’s “Cloud first, Mobile first” is a good example. Cloud threatened to creatively destroy Microsoft’s back office franchise, and mobile threatened to do the same to its PC operating system monopoly. Both were forcing functions. Now, it turns out that mobile did not work out for them, but cloud surely did. The point is, Satya’s tagline redefined Microsoft’s position, putting it in line for a whole new generation of investment. AMD is doing the same thing with AI chips, following Nvidia’s lead, just as Microsoft was following Amazon Web Services. Iconic companies do not have to lead the next wave. Nobody expects that, although Apple astoundingly did so not once, not twice, but three times within a space of little more than a decade. But because iconic enterprises have global footprints, because they are well positioned to capitalize on the new wave of change, they get the benefit of the doubt once they have demonstrated they can deliver products or services that make the grade.

That phrase “Satya’s tagline” leads me to my last point. You would think that changing the corporate narrative should be the function of corporate marketing, but it never is. First of all, it is unpopular, and marketing teams, aligned as they are with sales teams, are reluctant to do anything that would offend. Second, marketing does not have the clout. It wasn’t the tagline that anchored Microsoft’s change. It was the CEO himself, with the backing of the board.

And buried therein lies the third challenge — changing the narrative is deeply unpopular with value investors, particularly when it entails internal investments that impact earnings per share. It is not easy for a board of directors, who are continually reminded they are there to represent the interests of the shareholders, and the CEO, who is highly compensated to manage for shareholder value, to take a step back and do what they believe is the right thing for the long term.

Beneath a change in any corporate narrative, therefore, there is an underlying meta-narrative about the role of enterprise in relation to all its stakeholders. This includes its customers, partners, employees, and communities, as well as its investors. In that context, customers are family — they have skin in your game and are likely to stick with you through thick and thin. Investors, by contrast, do not. Your company is a financial instrument in their portfolio, and should it cease to perform the financial role they have in mind for it, they have no reason to hold onto it. You still need to take their interests seriously — they are your financial foundation — but they are not your reason for being. Customers are. So should you undertake to change your narrative, focus on why your customers need you to do so. They are your North Star.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Reimagining Personalization

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Reimagining Personalization

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Personalization was one of the leading rationales for companies investing in digitalization. The idea was that you were going to delight your customers by proactively offering them goods and services they were predisposed to want. This would create customer loyalty, increase their lifetime value, spur word-of-mouth endorsement, drive up Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and solve world hunger.

OK, not so much. A decade or more in, it’s time we ask ourselves, what is the real value of personalization, and how should we allocate our future investments in it? This begins with getting ourselves onto the right playing field in the first place. Personalization has different dynamics depending on whether your enterprise is Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Business (B2B), B2B2C or B2G2C. Here’s how it plays out.

B2C

Let’s face it — as consumers, we are tired of personalization in its current form. It isn’t really personal, it is just an unending barrage of re-targeted advertising that works statistically but not psychologically. Despite all its promises to the contrary, it is not in fact delightful. So, best to take all that language about delighting our customers and throw it in the trashcan.

Instead of looking for delighters, we should be examining our hygiene factors. These are the things that annoy customers most when they go awry — late shipping, lost luggage, long hold times, rejected passwords, tedious surveys — you name it. Getting hygiene right is hard, but doing so consistently drives brand loyalty through the roof — just ask Amazon. We love what they do so much we subscribe to them! The point is, the things we love are not personal, they are institutional. Amazon has invested enormously in systems that set expectations through timely communication, early anomaly detection, instant alerts, and the like. This is not marketing, it’s logistics, but it is personally delivered, and we feel empowered in a highly differentiated way. (BTW, note to Amazon — you are increasingly over-monetizing your landing pages with sponsored ads, thereby eroding your most valuable asset. You need to set limits and stick to them.)

B2B2C

Rethinking personalization creates a whole new wave of innovation for B2B2C companies to pursue. Instead of optimizing for clicks, help your customers better detect signals. To be fair, some of these could be buying signals, and they should be used to drive consumer traffic along existing lines. But machine learning is also extremely effective at monitoring hygiene factors wherever there is log data to exploit. Omniture was an early pioneer in using this technology for website optimization, and now with generative AI you can let your customers’ websites ask visitors what they are interested in seeing instead of playing whack-a-mole with their best guesses.

The point is, no company is happy with their website, ever — and frankly, for good reason. They are just too hard to navigate, too much about themselves, not enough about the customers and prospects they are there to serve. By focusing on hygiene factors rather than delighters, this can be changed.

B2G2C

OK, when it comes to dealing with government services, no one is really thinking about delighters. Nightmares, on the other hand, do come to mind. Once again, it’s all about hygiene factors. The services that are being offered meet real needs. It’s the obstacles that systems and bureaucracies put in the way of citizens seeking those services that drive everyone crazy.

The fastest way to cut through this mess is to embrace the adage Time is money. The goal is to relentlessly optimize for reducing latency while at the same time reducing fraud as well. This requires the very best in ML and AI, but those resources are available today, and there are plenty of socially minded entrepreneurs who are ready to put in the hard work to make them scale. The core metric of success is time to closure, the tracking of which will be no mean feat. One consequence of its success, to be frank, would be a reduction in bureaucratic employment — not just to free up more money for social services but rather to expedite transaction processing throughout the system. My hope would be that impacted agencies could redeploy their workforces into the field where face-to-face personal interaction actually can make a powerful difference in the moment.

B2B

One question that bugs the you-know-what out of CEOs of successful global enterprises is, Why do our customers keep telling us we are hard to do business with? Of course, the answer is because they are. The real question is what can they do about it? Here are some low-hanging-fruit places to start:

  • Disintermediate your salespeople from replenishment transactions. Instead, empower customers to transact on their own behalf through digital self-service portals. And extend the same courtesy to partners who are acting as agents on behalf of their customers.
  • Attack the long tail of your SKUs. Not only do they entangle your salespeople in majoring in minors, they confuse the heck out of your customers.
  • Stop imposing buying risks on your customers and take them upon yourself instead by tokenizing bundles to allow for swapping out unconsumed portions and truing up on overused ones.
  • Invest in customer success initiatives that build relationships higher up in the customer organization, leveraging thought leadership marketing, customer health scoring, and executive sponsors focused on deep listening. Customers can tell you what they really need from you if you’ll let them.

Here as elsewhere, the goal is not to delight the customer. Customers don’t want to be delighted. They want to be served – thoughtfully, reliably, and economically. Remember, it’s not about you. It’s about them.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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Rearchitecting the Landscape of Knowledge Work

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Rearchitecting the Landscape of Knowledge Work

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

One thing the pandemic made clear to everyone involved with the knowledge-work profession is that daily commuting was a ludicrously excessive tax on their time. The amount of work they were able to get done remotely clearly exceeded what they were getting done previously, and the reduction in stress was both welcome and productive. So, let’s be clear, there is no “going back to the office.” What is possible, on the other hand, is going forward to the office, and that is what we are going to discuss in this blog post.

The point is, we need to rethink the landscape of knowledge work—what work is best done where, and why. Let’s start with remote. Routine task work of the sort that a professional is expected to complete on their own is ideally suited to remote working. It requires no supervision to speak of and little engagement with others except at assigned checkpoints. Those checkpoints can be managed easily through video conferencing combined with collaboration-enabling software like Slack or Teams. Productivity commitments are monitored in terms of the quality and quantity of received work. This is game-changing for everyone involved, and we would be crazy to forsake these gains simply to comply with a return-to-the-office mandate.

That said, there are many good reasons still to want a return. Before we dig into them, however, let’s spend a moment on the bad reasons first. First among them is what we might call “boomer executive control needs”—a carry-over from the days of hierarchical management structures that to this day still run most of our bureaucracies. Implicit in this model is the notion that everyone needs supervision all the time. Let me just say that if that is the case in your knowledge-work organization, you are in big trouble, and mandating everyone to come back to the office is not going to fix it. The fix needed is workforce engagement, and that requires personal intervention, not systemic enforcement. Yes, you want to do this in person, and yes, the office is typically the right place to do so, but no, you don’t need everyone to be there all the time to do it.

This same caveat applies to other reasons why enterprises are mandating a return. Knowledge work benefits from social interactions with colleagues. You get to float ideas, hear about new developments, learn from observing others, and the like. It is all good, and you do need to be collocated to do it—just not every day. What is required instead is a new cadence. People need an established routine to know when they are expected to show up, one they can plan around far in advance. In short, we need the discipline of office attendance, we just want it to be more respectful of our remote work. In that light, a good place to start is a 60/40 split—your call as to which is which. But for the days that are in office, attendance is expected, not optional. To do anything else is to disrespect your colleagues and to put your personal convenience above the best interests of the enterprise that is funding you.

So much for coping with some of the bad reasons. Now let’s look into five good ones.

  1. Customer-facing challenges. This includes sales, account management, and customer success (but not customer support or tech support). The point is, whenever things are up for grabs on the customer side, it takes a team to wrestle them down to earth, and the members of that team need to be in close communication to detect the signals, strategize the responses, and leverage each other’s relationships and expertise. You don’t get to say when this happens, so you have to show up every day ready to play (meaning 80/20 is probably a more effective in-office/out-of-office ratio).
  2. Onboarding, team building, and M&A integration. Things can also be up for grabs inside your own organization, particularly when you are adding new people, building a new team (or turning around an old one), or integrating an acquisition. In these kinds of fluid situations, there is a ton of non-verbal communication, both to detect and to project, and there is simply no substitute for collocation. By contrast, career development, mentoring, and performance reviews are best conducted one-on-one, and here modern video conferencing with its high-definition visuals and zero-latency audio can actually induce a more focused conversation.
  3. Mission-critical systems operations. This is just common sense—if the wheels start to come off, you do not want to lose time assembling the team. Cybersecurity attacks would be one good example. On the other hand, with proper IT infrastructure, routine system monitoring, and maintenance as well as standard end-user support can readily leverage remote expertise.
  4. In-house incubations. It is possible to do a remote-only start-up if you have most of the team in place from the beginning, leveraging time in collocation at a prior company, especially if the talent you need is super-scarce and geographically dispersed.

    But for public enterprises leveraging the Incubation Zone, as well as lines of business conducting nested incubation inside their own organizations, a cadence surrounding collocation is critical. The reason is that incubations call for agile decision-making, coordinated course corrections, fast failures, and even faster responses to them. You don’t have to be together every day—there is still plenty of individual knowledge work to be done, but you do need to keep in close formation, and that requires frequent unscripted connections.

  5. Cross-functional programs and projects. These are simply impossible to do on a remote basis. There are too many new relationships that must be established, too many informal negotiations to get resources assigned, too many group sessions to get people aligned, and too much lobbying to get the additional support you need. This is especially true when the team is led by a middle manager who has no direct authority over the team members, only their managers’ commitment and their own good will.

So, what’s the best in-office/remote ratio for your organization?

You might try doing a high-level inventory of all the work you do, calling out for each workload which mode of working is preferable, and totaling it up to get a first cut. You can be sure that whatever you come up with will be wrong, but that’s OK because your next step will be to socialize it. Once you get enough fingerprints on it, you will go live with it, only to confirm it is still wrong, but now with a coalition of the willing to make it right, if only to make themselves look better.

Ain’t management fun?

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Google Gemini

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