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

Is Your AI in the Zone to Win?

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Whether you are catching up, keeping up, getting ahead, and fending off an existential threat, get in the zone!

Is Your AI in the Zone to Win?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

We’re already almost three years into the modern AI era, and everyone wants to know — What are we doing with AI? The board wants to know, the sales team wants to know, the customers want to know, the analysts want to know. Heck, you want to know.

So, how do you decide?

Start with a clear-eyed assessment of where your company stands relative to its peers in your industry. Are you behind? Are you on par but need to keep up? Are you out ahead or have a chance to be so? Or, in a darker vein, is AI opening your entire industry up to disruption, putting you and your peers under existential threat? The good news is that there are playbooks for dealing with each of these situations. The caveat is that they are all different. You need to execute them, if not linearly, then at least separately. And that’s where zone management can be a big help.

Catching Up

Industries in catch-up mode with respect to implementing AI might include retail (supply chain management, contact center productivity), higher education (admissions, alumni relations), and public sector (regulatory compliance services). The wolf is not at the door, but with AI moving as fast as it is, time is not your friend, so you need to get cracking. This is a job for the Productivity Zone.

Every organization in this zone — finance, HR, marketing, purchasing, customer success, security, you name it—is a candidate for implementing some kind of AI on a low-risk, get-acquainted basis. None of these applications will be so dramatic as to disrupt normal services, but each will give your AI team hands-on experience with the latest available technology, and most should deliver enough ROI to pay for themselves. Even when they don’t, they will contribute to the “Win or Learn” kitty, and that is what catching up is all about.

The key here is to move fast and on every front. That means every organization in this zone has to participate every quarter. Conduct AI progress reviews to hold each org leader accountable for net new wins or learnings every quarter. The goal is to catch up within a year, and it is important enough to tie performance to discretionary compensation to ensure both prioritization and inspection.

Keeping Up

Industries in a keep-up model with respect to implementing AI might include insurance (underwriting, claims), management consulting (tax, audit), and public sector (tax collection). All these areas represent customer-facing processes that are currently served by humans loaded down with routine work that can be done better, faster, and cheaper by AI applications. This is a job for the Performance Zone.

The goal here is to use AI to increase the competitiveness of your established lines of business, either through materially differentiating your products or dramatically reengineering your processes to lower costs, speed response times, and improve quality. The current generation of AI technology, because it is so remarkably approachable, is ready-made to take on this work. Your job is to make sure you use it to target those opportunities where there is the most trapped value to release. These will likely be a bit more gnarly than the others, but when you are mining for gold, you have to go where the gold is.

Generating such higher returns does not come without taking risk. Good as it is, AI is still a work in progress, so you will likely be taking a human-in-the-loop approach for the foreseeable future. The good news is your workforce is expert in your business, so you have the guard rails you need already in place. The challenge is that we humans are comfortable in our established routines, and you need everyone to break out of the old ways to free your company’s future from the pull of the past. This is more of a change management problem than an AI issue, so you should have no qualms about holding the leaders of this zone accountable.

Getting Ahead

Industries with a lot of built-in trapped value represent opportunities for first-movers to get ahead of their peers by radically reengineering the way business gets done. Examples might include residential real estate (title insurance, buyer agent compensation), health care (value-based care, home care), and public sector (social services). In each case, traditional bureaucracies are at odds with where the industry needs to go next, and implementing AI applications can be highly disruptive. This is a job for the Incubation Zone.

Venture-backed start-ups are normally the fastest movers here, but they take a long time to scale. Established enterprises have the customers, the ecosystems, and the balance sheets to get to the finish line first if they can get out of their own way. That’s what the Incubation Zone is designed to do. As described at length in Zone to Win, it emulates the VC operating model without attempting to replicate its financial model. The goal is to win early market marquee customers and cross the chasm, all without any help (or hindrance) from the core business. You have all the resources you need to do this, but it requires muscles you haven’t used in a long time, so funneling one or more acquisitions into the Incubation Zone is often a good tactic.

The key challenge will come when you reach enough scale to bring the new line of business into the Performance Zone. In the best of circumstances, you can leverage the more forward-thinking elements in your partner ecosystem and customer base to create a soft landing, running both the old and new lines side by side, as Netflix did for some time with its DVD and streaming businesses. Sooner or later, however, you will have to rip off the Band-Aid and make the transition to the new path, again as Netflix did.

Fending Off an Existential Threat

At present, the existential threat posed by Generative AI and its successors is still hard to predict, but two industries that have already sensed it are media entertainment (content creation, acting) and publishing (copyright, fair use). What should their playbook be?

This is a job for the Transformation Zone. The playbook requires all four zones to fly in formation to get through a very rough patch. The Productivity Zone goes into action first, launching legal actions against the invaders and pursuing lobbying efforts to get protective legislation. This is not a long-term solution, but it does buy some much needed time.

Meanwhile, the Incubation Zone is charged with catching up to the new wave as fast as possible. The goal here is not to out-innovate the innovators. That is what Yahoo tried to do to fend off Google, and Nokia to fend off Apple. The attackers are too good at what they do, and you are playing their game. Instead, take a lesson from how Microsoft has played catch-up throughout its storied history, beginning catching WordPerfect with Word, Lotus 123 with Excel, Aldus Persuasion with PowerPoint, and moving on to the Mac GUI with Windows, Novell with Windows NT, and Netscape Navigator with Internet Explorer. Most recently, they executed the catch-up-fast playbook to head off Amazon Web Services with Azure. The key to their success is to get to “good enough, fast enough,” not to out-perform the disruptor but to keep their own existing customer base on their side, again buying time to innovate further once it is clear they are in the game to stay.

One thing you do not want to do as an established enterprise is to merge with a successful disruptor. The Time Warner AOL merger provides a cautionary lesson here. The cultures are too different, and the necessary level of mutual trust just isn’t there, so instead of running in parallel, they work at cross purposes, and the result is a tangled mess.

On the Performance Zone side, you have to keep pedaling (and peddling) the legacy line of businesses. Absent private equity, they are your only source of capital, and they are still providing value. But you have to realize that their profit margins are under direct attack and can only be defended through rear-guard actions. That is, your legacy profit pool is the current site of trapped value, and draining it is what is funding the next wave of innovation. You don’t like it, and your investors hate it, but that’s the hand you have to play.

And that brings us to the Transformation Zone proper. You are going through a transition, the intermediate stages of which are ugly, making everyone cranky, and causing rampant second-guessing of every move you make. This is where the CEO must lead with clarity, transparency, and conviction, rallying the troops, reaching out to the customer base, providing an investable narrative to the stakeholders, and reassuring the partner ecosystem. Moreover, every senior executive must unequivocally support the chosen path or else be asked to leave. When you are under existential threat, there can be no fooling around.

Summing Up

The AI tsunami is upon us, and we can expect wave after wave of disruption for the rest of this decade and the next one as well. Clearly, it offers a wealth of opportunity, but as with all waves, catching it depends on getting your timing right and finding the right angle of attack. The four playbooks outlined above have been tested over many decades within the high sector as it dealt with the disruptive impact of the microprocessor, the Internet, cloud computing, SaaS applications, smartphones, and social media. You may not be as familiar with them as you would like, but the risk of waiting on the sidelines exceeds the risk of taking the plunge, so I can only encourage you to grab your nose plugs and jump in.

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

— Image credit: Gemini

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Focus on Delivering Your Customers’ Desired Outcomes, Not Delighting Them

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Focus on Delivering Your Customers' Desired Outcomes, Not Delighting Them

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

Now, let me be clear. I have nothing against delight. But the notion that it should be the goal of a business to delight its customers is folly. Delight, after all, is an evanescent experience that comes and goes pretty much as it pleases. It cannot be reliably evoked. More importantly, your customers, and particularly your B2B customers, are not paying you in order to be delighted. Indeed, while ostensibly they are purchasing your products and services, what they really want to buy is outcomes.

As Ted Levitt taught many years ago, while a customer may need to buy a quarter-inch drill, what they really want to buy is a quarter-inch hole. A successful sales campaign, therefore, starts with getting clarity on what outcomes constitute success. This is harder than it sounds. Success is seen very differently from the perspectives of the executive sponsor, the department manager, the end user, the technical specialist, the CIO, and the CFO. All six of these have a stake in the game, and you will need their support to establish an enduring relationship.

Now, to be fair, a lot of business as usual doesn’t call for executive attention because inertial momentum is already on the side of the desired outcomes. It’s when the customer needs to change the status quo that we need to develop a multi-stakeholder current-state/future-state roadmap for success. So, let’s imagine you are in the IT industry and you are looking to land a major new account. What kind of a journey would that entail?

  • The Executive Sponsor. The process starts with engaging the executive sponsor in a discussion of the current state of their business, what potential future state they may have in mind, and what “value traps” are impeding their progress. In this discussion you have the opportunity to demonstrate genuine intellectual curiosity about the dynamics of their company and industry and to propose connections between your offerings and their aims. The deeper this conversation goes, the bigger the opportunity space becomes. This, in other words, is where five-figure deals can become six-figure, and six-figure deals become seven-figure, for the outcome the executive sponsor really wants is to move the big rocks, not just to smooth out the gravel.
  • The Department Manager. Department managers, on the other hand, are up to their ankles in gravel and they need your help to deal with it. Once again, engaging them in an intellectually curious conversation about their value traps allows you to identify the outcomes that will make a real difference and to make sure you highlight them in your proposal and prioritize them in your implementation. The outcome department managers want is productivity improvement for their team, as measured by faster response times, better quality, and greater throughput. The executive sponsor supports this sort of thing, but they have delegated it to the department manager, and so do not need to be directly involved.
  • The End Users. The end users who work for the department manager are the ones whose behavior you will directly impact and whose buy-in you must secure. The outcomes they seek are improvements in their personal effectiveness and efficiency. Most frequently they are looking for relief from mundane repetitive tasks that a smarter system would just do for them in the background. “Free me from the stupid stuff!” might be their battle cry. With the rise of RPA (Robotic Process Automation), complemented now with GenAI (Generative AI), this is becoming increasingly feasible to deliver. One thing to remember with end-user communities, however, is that they mirror the Technology Adoption Life Cycle in miniature, meaning they are comprised of enthusiasts, visionaries, pragmatists, conservatives, and skeptics. Each profile defines successful outcomes in very different terms, so the Customer Success team needs to identify the adoption profile of the individual they are working with before they go about prescribing tactics for meeting their needs.
  • The Technical Specialist. It is not until you get to the technical specialist that you find anyone who is really interested in your product. This, in other words, is the first person who actually wants to see your demo. Demoing to any of the prior three stakeholders is typically a waste of time, at least until you can tune the demo to highlight the outcome they seek. But with technical specialists, it is critical to your success. They are often the ones who get to make the call between competing products that have roughly the same functionality, and you need expertise in both yours and the competitors’ offers so you can answer their questions with authority. A successful outcome for this stakeholder is to have a high-performing product to support.
  • The CIO. The CIO has bigger fish to fry, and once again, you need to be sensitive to where they sit in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Visionaries who drive digital transformation will care a ton about platforms to support the future and be desperate to free themselves from the technical debt of legacy systems. Success for them is a next-generation infrastructure that can help modernize their company’s operating model, and they will move heaven and earth to get it. Pragmatists can have similar goals but will want to proceed more methodically, looking for predictable outcomes that come in on spec, on time, and on budget, as confirmed by customer references that are in production. Meanwhile, conservatives are secretly hoping they can just pass this baton to their successor, and skeptics will simply dig in their heels.
  • The CFO. The CFO is likely to view success in terms of verifiable ROI, yet again with a Technology Adoption Life Cycle wrinkle. Conservative CFOs will be looking for “hard dollar” savings—direct reductions in out-of-pocket costs. Pragmatic CFOs will look beyond these to include “soft dollar” savings from productivity gains in throughput, cycle time, and quality. Visionary CFOs (and, yes, there are such folk) look beyond this for step-function changes in competitive advantage that would change the multiple of their stock price. What unites all of the above is that all these success outcomes have some flavor of “Show me the money!”
  • The Account Plan. As sales teams well know, every account plays out in its own unique ways, but we can do our best to nudge it toward our goals. This starts with prioritizing the importance of our six stakeholders with respect to the buying decision on the table. If we have to create or redirect budget, then we need to call high, but if we are simply looking to consume budget, then we need to focus on the middle management instead. So, as an account manager, get your team to rank order the six stakeholders and then focus your efforts on the top two or three.

With respect to those top targets, the next step is to get the team to agree on their Technology Adoption profile. This is super important because you only get a limited amount of attention from any of these folks, and you don’t want to waste cycles on messages that won’t land.

Third, once you get a realistic sense of the outcome that are driving the sales cycle from the customer’s point of view, you need to differentiate your proposal both by calling them out as key goals and then customizing your offer to ensure they will get achieved.

All in all, it’s not rocket science, but it does require patience, and most of all, it calls for you to genuinely engage with the target personas to develop a differentiating understanding of what they are really after.

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

— Image credit: Pexels

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Category Creation

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Category Creation

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

Category creation is a critical success factor for start-ups bringing to market a disruptive innovation that calls for a new ecosystem, to support a new class of use cases, funded by a new budget line item. If the category does not form, the start-ups have no place to hang their hat. They can acquire early adopter customers via a bespoke project approach, but they cannot scale any further without help from the rest of the marketplace.

Similarly, established enterprises in mature categories also need to find new venues for growth if they are to break free from their value-investor-set market caps and create net new shareholder value. Whether through acquisition or in-house innovation, they, too, can have the challenge of category creation. So, in both cases, companies need to reengineer the marketplace in order to realize their ambitions. The question is, what would make the marketplace want to lean in?

Marketplaces are made up of ecosystem players, be they partners, competitors, or an installed base of customers. All these constituencies keep their eyes out for disruptive developments that could either benefit or jeopardize their future performance. The early adopters are typically motivated by the benefits, seeking a first mover advantage, while the early majority normally takes a wait-and-see approach, thereby creating a chasm, which in turn can be crossed wherever there is an urgent customer problem that is resisting standard solutions and thus warrants taking a novel approach to solve it. If the category does show it is getting traction, then all those wait-and-see pragmatists will begin to feel threatened by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), and that is what creates a tornado of demand that puts the category permanently on the map.

Okay, so there is reason to believe that under the right circumstances, markets will support the creation of a new category. That said, we should not underestimate the power of inertia. Markets do not welcome transformational changes with open arms. Indeed, their default move is to deflect most attempts. What we need is a proven playbook. Fortunately, there is one, written some forty years ago, written by an old boss of mine, Regis McKenna.

The Regis Touch

It is hard to overstate the impact that Regis had on high-tech marketing, especially in its early days when it was trying to break free from advertising as its primary medium. At the time, the tech sector was just emerging, the bulk of spending was in B2B markets, the focus was on automating core business processes, and every buying decision entailed considerable risk, not only in terms of the product and vendor’s staying power but also in terms of the impact of the business processes themselves. As a result, advertising per se was not sufficiently informative or credible to drive purchasing. Regis saw this and, with the help of a talented set of consultants and communications professionals, developed a public-relations-led approach that successfully launched hundreds of new products and created dozens of new categories.

The key to his approach was a framework called the infrastructure model that organized the various audiences and constituencies that make up a marketplace in what one might call a ladder of communications:

Relationship Marketing Infrastructure Model Geoffrey Moore

Here’s how it works. The goal is to convert prospects into customers. In B2B markets, those prospects organize around three centers of interest—the technology itself, the impact on productivity, and the financial returns. These prospects get their information most directly from the media, the technologists from the technical press, the end users these days from social media (no such thing, of course, back in the day), and the executives from the business press. The agents of the press, in turn, get a lot of their information from opinion leaders, be they the industry analysts for the technical press, the influencers for social media, or the financial investment analysts for the business press. Those opinion leaders, in turn, get their information from their engagement with the marketplace itself, be they customers, partners, or competitors already involved with the disruptive innovation.

The point is, any claims about the disruptive innovation are verified and validated by working down this model, which means any communications program should organize around working up the same model. Skipping over any one of these audiences and going straight to the prospects directly—the way advertising does—is bound to fail because you have not got your references lined up and sufficiently informed to support and endorse a high-risk buying decision. Product launches and category creation initiatives, therefore, work up this ladder of communications, rung by rung, starting in the executive suite, moving from there to the product organization, and from there to the go-to-market team. That team, in turn, needs to start with educating the ecosystem players, typically with talks and panel sessions at industry conferences, then connecting with the opinion leaders, typically via one-on-one briefings that end up being two-way dialogs, and only then out to the media that will engage with the target prospects.

Category Creation Playbook

A lot of what would go into a complete playbook is product and market-specific, but there are audience-centric principles that remain relatively constant. The key question in each case is, what is it about the emerging category that would be of interest to this particular constituency? With that in mind, here is a brief take:

  1. Executive team. This team will value growth to boost market cap, something that participation in an emerging category can be expected to deliver, but it may well be reluctant to take transformational risk to achieve it. If this team is not 100% behind the effort, don’t start, as every other rung on the latter ultimately calls for investments that this team must endorse.
  2. Product team. This team has to be all in for a wild ride—and usually is. You have to pressure test their claims nonetheless, as they can often get over their skis, promising more than they can deliver within the window that matters.
  3. Go-to-market team. This team requires maturity and patience. The big sales commissions won’t come until the category enters the tornado, so for now, the focus is on creating a market, not harvesting it. That means paying deep attention to developing the ecosystem, including bringing along the installed base, helping to engage and enlist partners, and (oddly enough) encouraging competitors. The last one is important because, ultimately, a category is defined by a set of competitors, not just one company, so for a healthy growing category you need to have peers that are winning too—hopefully in target market segments that are distinct from yours.
  4. Ecosystem. These are the people your go-to-market team is engaging with. The sales team has the installed base, the business development team, the partners, and the marketing team, the competitors. The goal is to get everyone speaking from their own perspective to reinforce your story that something big is underway. One item of note: With respect to competitors, marketing needs to develop a narrative that has room for more than one winner while at the same time staking out turf where your own differentiation makes you the obvious choice. What you do not want to do is bad-mouth the other team’s products—that will create anxiety that will cause everyone to wait and see some more. So, save your sharp tongue for when you get inside the tornado—that’s the no-holds-barred battleground where a well-placed elbow can make a real difference.
  5. Opinion leaders. The goal here is to get conceptual endorsement for the claims you will be making via the media. Opinion leaders need to maintain their independence and do not want to shill for you or anyone else. What they do want to do is look intelligent and have something differentiated to say. What they want from you is enough context to do their job and no interference thereafter. In addition, opinion leaders want to share their opinions with you, in part to influence your future investments, and so it is just as important to listen and ask them questions as it is to present your own story. With respect to your presentation, demos can be useful, but repurposing a customer sales pitch is not, as this audience is not going to buy your product but rather is going to opine on the reasons why other people might.
  6. Media. This is the means by which you will communicate with the three prospect audience types—the technical team, the end users, and the executive sponsors. Each has a preferred media type—industry press, social media, and business press—and each of these types wants to be treated in its own special way. The technical press wants to talk about the product itself. They want facts, love demos, and like to talk to specialists more than generalists. They also are often happy to beta test products or get any other kind of advanced notice as to what’s coming next. Social media wants to talk about the applications of the product, and the ways in which it will impact end users’ lives. So demos can work here only if they are in service to an end-user story as opposed to a run-through of all the features and functions. The business press wants to talk about the “size of the prize,” the impact of the new technology on productivity, how it will reengineer bottlenecking processes, and thus how much trapped value it will be able to release. Demos are wasted here, but PowerPoint can help a lot.
  7. Prospects. When category creation is the focus, it is important to engage the three types of prospects in the right order. If the technology is outrageous, you need to start with the technical audience first just to earn the right to talk to anyone else. If it is not outrageous, then the executive sponsor needs to be your first port of call. The reason is that the other two audiences will actually be willing to meet with you to learn about the latest and greatest thing, but they will have budget, not permission to get new budget, if the executive sponsor is not on board. So a typical path through a major account would start with an executive from your company having a conversation with the prospective executive sponsor at your target customer, which would lead to a referral to the technical team to test your bona fides, and then on to the end-user team, to validate your productivity claims. Proof-of-concept projects are necessary at the very beginning, but one of the major milestones in category creation per se is to generate enough marketplace acceptance that future prospects will forgo these tests.

To sum up, category creation is an outbound communications effort to orchestrate a coalition of the willing across a laddered set of constituencies, each with its own set of interests. The goal is to build an inbound path of verification that reinforces the new category’s right to existence. Trying to shortcut the outbound process by skipping over one or more audiences will defeat the purpose, as any doubts raised this early in the game result in lost momentum that can never be recovered. There is no magic here, but patience and discipline are required.

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

— Image credit: Pexels

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A Tale of Two Narratives on Polarization

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A Tale of Two Narratives on Polarization

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

In a time of increasing polarization, amplified by social media and exacerbated by malicious actors, we all need to deepen our understanding of just what we are into. Polarization, as I described in a previous blog on this subject, is best understood as an artifact of people binding their identities to explanatory narratives that validate their experience of the world, especially those experiences that activate their deepest fears. Binding to narrative per se is fundamental to both psychological and social stability, and in that context, it is natural and healthy. But when the narrative is being deliberately corrupted in order to manipulate public opinion, it fosters increasingly antagonistic relationships, dehumanizing the antagonists and inflaming the protagonists, both of which encourage us to treat fellow human beings as targets for marginalization, incarceration, or elimination.

In contemporary culture, there are two framing narratives that are driving this kind of polarization (and let me give shout out to Tangle for calling them to my attention):

  1. Civilization vs the Barbarians. In this narrative, “we” are the defenders of what is good, noble, and sacred in human culture, and “they” are agents of evil, degradation, and blasphemy. Thus, “we” can consider ourselves exempt from ethical accountability in our actions against them because “they” are threatening the very foundation of ethics itself.
  2. Oppressed vs the Oppressors. In this narrative, “we” are the victims of political, social, and economic exploitation by “them,” an overclass that has acquired a disproportionate share of power, wealth, and entitlements illegitimately at our expense. Thus, “we” can consider ourselves exempt from ethical accountability in our actions against them because “they” have unethically disenfranchised us.

Both narratives can be legitimate under extreme conditions, but each also lends itself to inflammatory purposes as well. Historically, the role of news reporting has been to help us distinguish between these two states. What is disgraceful about today’s media is that major broadcast networks, as well as previously highly respected publications, have not just abandoned this role but are actively engaged in subverting it. Let’s look a little more closely at what they are up to.

Civilization vs the Barbarians

This is the narrative framework that underlies Israel’s stance about its war with Hamas. It is also the one the US used to justify its post-9/11 actions against both Iraq and Isis. In both instances, provoked by starkly violent surprise attacks against purely civilian targets, outrage and righteous indignation fueled a demand for massive retaliation. There was simply no room for acknowledging any mitigating circumstances, any possible responsibility for creating the conditions that might have led to the terrorist attacks, or any accountability for subsequent acts of retributive retaliation regardless of how appalling they, in turn, might have been.

Now, given the extremity of the provocations, it is hard to see how any of this could have been avoided. But the civilization-vs-barbarians narrative is being used much more broadly in contemporary political discourse to address concerns that are much less extreme, including the following:

  • Right-wing outrage over illegal immigration
  • Left-wing outrage over anti-abortion legislation
  • Right-wing outrage over students demonstrating over the war in Gaza
  • Left-wing outrage over climate change deriders
  • Right-wing outrage over DEI initiatives
  • Left-wing outrage over 2020 election deniers.
  • Right-wing outrage over atheism
  • Left-wing outrage over book-banning

The key term here, in case you missed it, is outrage. Outrage uses righteousness to legitimize an explosion of anger against a community-sanctioned target. But the roots of that anger are not in the object of its attention. They are in the subject that has been carrying that burden around internally and who has now found a socially acceptable way to release it. And don’t think this applies just to “other people.” No one (except maybe a saint) is exempt here. You and I are as subject to the power of narratives as anyone else—it is only the trigger narratives themselves that separate us.

Look back over the bullet points above. Each of them is encased in a narrative, be it based on fact or urban legend. We should not be naïve about the power of these narratives to shape public opinion and influence elections. Psychologically, they play upon some of our deepest fears and then offer us a protective shield that is both internally coherent and externally impenetrable. That’s what makes the civilization-vs-barbarians narrative such a powerful political tool.

Oppressed vs the Oppressors

This is the narrative framework that underlies US college student protests in support of the Palestinians and against Israel’s sustained offensive in the Gaza Strip, as well as NATO support for the Ukraine and US support for Taiwan. Inside the US, it underpins support for the homeless, defunding of the police, and decriminalization of drug use. In each case, in order to relieve the debilitating conditions these communities are living under, the narrative calls for a radical change in the status quo, including a willingness to deprioritize legal justice in order to achieve social justice.

There are two separate audiences this narrative seeks to engage. Ostensibly, it is the oppressed themselves, but this can be misleading. Under exceptional circumstances, it is true that such narratives can trigger a revolution of the oppressed, but more commonly, these folks are in no position to take action on their own behalf. The far more frequent audience is people of means who have the power to take action and who empathize with the cause. This results in two kinds of calls to action—a revolutionary path, led by the oppressed, which seeks to overthrow the oppressors through violent means, and a liberal path, led by the empathizers, which seeks reform by working within the system.

Although we associate the oppressed-vs-the-oppressors narrative primarily with the left, we should note that the far right is leveraging it as well, as witnessed by the following widely held claims:

  • The woke liberal establishment is imposing socialist agendas around climate change and DEI on the oppressed white middle class.
  • Parental rights are under attack, threatened by liberal ideologies that have taken over public schools.
  • The 2020 election was rigged by Democrats, and Republicans, therefore, need not accept the results of the 2024 election because it also could be rigged.
  • Donald Trump did not get a fair trial because it, too, was rigged.
  • (And at the far right) the tyranny of the Deep State is so oppressive it warrants patriotic citizens taking up arms and shedding blood.

The Implications

To sum up, both political parties are using both narratives, but in very different contexts.

  • US Right: “Oppressors are the woke liberal establishment imposing socialist agendas around climate change and DEI on the oppressed white middle class.”
  • US Right: “Barbarians are the illegal immigrants seeking to invade our country and take over our democracy by outnumbering the civilized native white citizenry.”
  • US Left: “Oppressors are the conservative capitalist establishment imposing unjust requirements on disadvantaged populations, including illegal immigrants, the homeless, and the addicted.”
  • US Left: “Barbarians are the far-right politicians and pundits undermining the rule of law with fake news and demagogic rhetoric to block reproductive rights, equal opportunity programs, and climate change initiatives.”

Any attempt to argue people off of any of these positions is almost certain to fail, not because the arguments that support them are especially persuasive, but because people have bound their identities to them so tightly that they cannot break with them. As part of this binding, society self-segregates into “Us” and “Them,” each with its own amplifying media sources, its own signals of solidarity, its own righteous indignation, its own contempt for the other side.

Given all that, what could anyone seeking a better way possibly do? That is a question for a future blog post, one that is still very much in the works. For now, we should just note when these narratives are being used in corrupt ways to legitimize illegitimate claims and do our best to detach ourselves from them.

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

— Image credit: Pixabay

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Search Engine Marketing in the Era of AI-Assisted Search

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Search Engine Marketing in the Era of AI-Assisted Search

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

My social media maven, Rich Stimbra, forwarded me the following as a potential blog topic:

Google’s revamped, AI-infused search is making businesses that depend on web search results anxious, and news publishers are already warning it could have “catastrophic” effects on the industry. Why? Google’s newly announced AI Overviews, set to launch this week in the U.S., synthesizes answers to users’ queries, and even though it will probably contain links, information from “know-it-all AI tools” could be thorough enough that users decide not to click through. News sites, whose audiences have already taken a hit from their content being downranked on social media, are bracing for further erosion from Google’s AI update.

Google unleashes AI in search, raising hopes for better results and fears about less web traffic

Boy, was he right. AI is bound to be a game-changer for both media and marketers alike, but not necessarily for the worst, provided that both communities up their games appropriately. Here’s what I think we have to prepare for:

  • Media — Yes, you are going to be disinter-media-ted (ouch!). But if your content is sufficiently differentiated, relevant, and impactful, its quality should cause it to rise to the top of the AI’s selection stack. Most of your material may not pass this test, which means you are going to have to acquire and retain your subscribers on your own. The result is almost certainly to be a smaller but more homogenous subscriber base that will be of more value to marketers targeting your core base and considerably less value to the “spray and pray” bunch. That, in turn, means you will likely be able to raise your CPM rates for those leads you do deliver while pivoting your business model to make more of your cash flow from subscribers rather than advertisers.
  • B2B Marketers — I expect this to be a boon for you because it should filter out a lot of low-quality leads and pass through higher-quality ones. The larger your ASP (Average Selling Price), the more important it is not to pursue underperforming lead-gen. But historically, lead-gen best practices have been developed by the B2C marketers, which encourages a very wide top-of-funnel in order to get as much market coverage as possible. B2B marketing wants a much more qualified top-of-funnel because the cost and time to qualify make low-quality leads a real burden. The CPM for more qualified leads will legitimately be higher, so the direct cost goes up, but the indirect cost of post-processing should decline more than enough to make up the difference. Additionally, business prospects are more likely to act on value-added responses than raw search results, which is good news, provided your content has sufficient relevance and impact to make the cut.
  • B2C Marketers — This is not good news for you. It narrows the top-of-funnel, potentially dramatically, and weeds out marginal leads which you are able to qualify much more cost-effectively than your B2B colleagues. For low-cost items, I expect your digital marketing dollars will shift increasingly to direct-to-consumer venues on popular social media platforms, spending more with influencers and less on raw coverage. For higher-priced ones, I expect a next-gen, AI-enhanced approach to email (text, messaging, etc.) marketing will pay off as well.

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

Image Credit: Pexels

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After the Chasm – Scaling Beyond the Beachhead

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After the Chasm - Scaling Beyond the Beachhead

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Crossing the chasm is the single most important goal for a B2B application that seeks to disrupt the status quo. The playbook has held up for more than 30 years because it continues to just work. That said, it does not say anything about what to do if you’re stuck in the mud on the other side. So, let’s suppose your enterprise has successfully crossed the chasm, achieved tens of millions of dollars in ARR, but is no longer growing at a rate to keep pace with the Rule of 40 percent (the sum of your profit and your growth rate). Your investors are getting antsy. Now what?

First of all, know your place. You are still sub-scale for a customer CFO to consider you desirable as a go-to vendor. Same goes for a CIO who is trying to consolidate rather than expand the list of vendors they are working with. So, as with crossing the chasm, your only ally will be a process owner with a problem process that is not getting the IT support they need. This time, however, you are looking for an adjacent process owner, someone for whom your chasm-crossing sponsor would make a good reference. This lowers the bar for how problematic the use case may be because there is already some proof that the solution will work.

Note that we are still at the departmental level, still a point-product app, not a platform, not a suite. Those are all worthy ambitions for the future, but if you try to activate them now, the CFO and the CIO will get involved, and you will get bogged down in proof-of-concept exercises that will take forever to scale.

That said, it is not too early to recruit ecosystem partners to help secure your beachhead and expand your reach. The key here is to engage with companies that are big enough to help but small enough to give you their full attention—not Tier 1 systems integrators, more like outsourced service providers to small and medium businesses or specific departmental functions. You don’t need a lot of these, but the ones you do recruit have to lean in, so make sure that there is enough trapped value in the target use case to pay both you and them a premium for resolving it. To accelerate this effort, ask your professional services team to package up their hard-won knowledge and make it available to the partners who can expand your beachhead market. You want your team to be plowing in the adjacent field, not harvesting in the initial one.

On the go-to-market side, you still need to be disciplined in deploying most of your resources into the target market segment and not letting them get distracted by chasing one-off opportunities elsewhere. That said, you can relax a bit from the laser focus of chasm-crossing as long as, say, two-thirds of the marketing and sales resources are directly aligned with your current goal. Remember at this point that marketing is still a territory capture game, so you want to go after targets that are big enough to matter but small enough to lead, and as always, a good fit with your crown jewels.

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

Image Credit: Geoffrey Moore

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Your 3 Phase AI Journey

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Your 3 Phase AI Journey

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

As companies move from experimenting with GenAI to deploying for real ROI, executives should plan for three phases of development along the following lines:

Phase One: Optimize your operating model. This is the one everyone gets right away. Every business process is encumbered by ‘stupid stuff’ — low-value-adding tasks that are “how we do business around here.” These are all candidates from process re-engineering, but in the meantime, people have to work through them or around them to get anything done. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can solve for the ones that are routine. GenAI expands the aperture to include those that demand creating situation-specific text, the sort of thing that would answer an FAQ, nudge a prospect to take a call, or check in on users that are at risk of churning out. Expediting this sort of work is a no-regrets move, entailing little risk while generating modest ROI.

Phase Two: Upgrade your infrastructure model. While you will likely start your Phase One journey leveraging out-of-the-box GenAI from Microsoft, Google, or Amazon, as you get deeper into it, you will want to add RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to the mix. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the process of optimizing the output of a large language model so it references an authoritative knowledge base outside of its training data sources before generating a response. Basically, it taps into confidential in-house knowledge stores, as well as any external sources that provide expertise specific to your business, to build a more effective prompt for the public GenAI to leverage. Coordinating the APIs, keeping the guard rails on the process, and capturing the reusable knowledge gained will all require additional investment in your in-house IT capabilities.

Phase Three: Revisit your business model. Sooner or later, AI is going to materially disrupt the way business is done in your industry, eliminating old sources of trapped value while creating new ones at the same time. Customers will still look to your company to help them achieve their business outcomes, but they will be paying for different things than they pay for today. Consultancies and legal firms, for example, can expect to re-engineer their billable hour model, financial services their transaction fee model, and search engines their sponsored-ad model. The larger your enterprise, the more disruptive this is likely to be, so this would be a good time to test out new models in your Incubation Zone.

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

Image Credit: Geoffrey Moore

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Artificial Intelligence is a Rorschach Test

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Artificial Intelligence is a Rorschach Test

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Concerns about the potential negative impact of AI on humanity’s future well-being continue to foster discussion across a wide swath of society with pundits weighing in from every imaginable point of view. The fundamental unit of discourse that unites all these efforts is the scenario. As humans, when we have no facts, we generate narratives, which we then mine for insights and test for credibility. In the high-tech sector, we have been doing this for decades because disruptive innovations, by virtue of their very novelty, have no history, and so must win investment capital and early adopter support through story-telling.

As a former literature professor, I could not feel more at home. So, let us apply a little literary criticism to some of the doomsday narratives currently in circulation. Start with the Terminator scenario. Great movie—but if we take it literally for a moment, I don’t think its core premise can hold up. That premise is that an AI system can have the same kind of intention and ambition that underlies human behavior. But intention and ambition, attributes shared not just by humans but by all living things, are anchored in an involuntary compulsion to live and reproduce. Human beings, though fragile individually, are an integral manifestation of life itself, and life itself has an extraordinary performance record, having been playing Planet Earth uninterruptedly for over four billion years (beat that, Taylor Swift!) despite meteor strikes, ice ages, and massive volcanic eruptions. AI systems can be programmed to mimic and adopt our strategies for living, but they have no compulsion to live, and it has nothing like this heritage behind it.

A far more chilling narrative, to my way of thinking, is AI in the hands of malicious human actors. This is hardly a scenario, for we have already seen it wreak havoc across the digitally transforming landscape that constitutes contemporary society. The most immediate existential threat is releasing self-governing AI agents that slip the bounds of their control system and promulgate horrific consequences. This is the Jurassic Park narrative, and while its biology is fanciful, its theme of unintended consequences is anything but.

Preparing for this possibility is where various governmental agencies are focusing much of their attention, but here too the narrative has a credibility problem. The notion that legislative bodies could possibly keep pace with the pact of AI’s evolution, not to mention enlisting the societal support necessary to enforce their regulatory efforts, is simply ludicrous. And that brings us to a third narrative for context, Natural Selection.

When living things are put under existential threat, they accelerate their rate of mutation, abandoning the safe and steady course of inertial progress, because that is no longer safe at all. It’s ‘innovate or die’ time. Most of these mutations fail, but for four billion years, at least some of them have always succeeded. If we transplant that strategy into the human realm, it argues for enlisting agile, individual, and hopefully well-meaning talent to engage with a raft of unanticipated challenges, a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them. Legislation can help ratify and scale successful responses once they have been proven effective, but it cannot prevent the challenges from emerging in the first place, and frankly, should not try. Of course, it will try, and that I expect will add yet another layer of unintended consequences onto a plate that is already full.

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

Image Credit: Gemini

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The Fourth Inning in the Future of Work

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The Future of Work Evolution: What Inning Are We In?

• Editor’s Note: The State of the Game in 2026

When tech strategist Geoffrey A. Moore penned this piece in the spring of 2024, the “top of the fourth inning” was characterized by the initial, frantic rush toward generative AI adoption and a baseline shift toward customer success. Two years later, as we navigate 2026, the game has rapidly intensified.

We are no longer just talking about shifting toward “outcomes”—we are actively building the infrastructure to measure them. The baseline has evolved from simple subscription tracking to deep Experience Management Offices (XMOs) and Experience Level Measures (XLMs), proving that human-centered value is the ultimate digital metric. Furthermore, the early AI hype has matured into what we call the AI Soft Landing, where organizations are moving past experimental tools to restructure workflows around systemic, human-led collaboration. Read on to explore Geoffrey’s brilliant structural breakdown of how we arrived at this pivotal inning.

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

It’s spring of 2024, and as Major League baseball is getting underway, everyone in tech is talking about the future of work. Let me suggest we are in the top of the fourth inning, a couple of runners on base, but still much to be decided (all with the understanding that an inning in tech lasts somewhere between one and two decades—and you thought baseball games were long!). At any rate, here’s how I see it playing out.

The first inning where tech made a definitive impact on work spanned the 1970s and 80s when the dominant paradigm was proprietary mainframe computing and the focus was on management information systems. This was an era of control cultures where the mantra was plan your work and then work your plan. IBM and Oracle were the dominant players, and workflows were organized around reports.

The second inning emerged with the rise of client-server computing in the 1990s, where the focus was on real-time business processes. This was an era of competition cultures where the mantra was give me my objectives, give me my resources, and get the hell out of my way. Microsoft and Cisco were the dominant players, and workflows were organized around documents.

The third inning emerged out of the tech bubble popping at the turn of the century, where the dominant paradigm transitioned to cloud computing combined with mobile applications, and the focus shifted from B2B complex systems to B2C volume operations. This was an era of creativity cultures where the mantra was think different. Google and Apple were the dominant players, and workflows were organized around transactions.

Now we find ourselves at the top of the fourth inning, initiated with the rise of artificial intelligence, where the focus is on as-a-service subscription business models, the economics of churn, and the importance of the customer experience. This is an era of collaboration cultures where the mantra is put customer success before everything else. The dominant players have yet to be determined, but we do know that workflows will be organized around outcomes.

And that’s the point. Information technology that began at the periphery of the business as a back office report generation utility has now migrated to the very core of the enterprise’s mission, vision, and values. That’s why digital transformation is getting so much attention. But how to transform, and how to use digital technology to ensure that customers achieve the outcomes they seek, is very much still a work in progress.

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

Image Credit: Gemini

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Understanding Polarization

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Understanding Polarization

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

One might be forgiven for thinking that our world is undergoing an unprecedented crisis of polarization, but to help put things in perspective, here are some lyrics from a song sung by the Kingston Trio in 1959 to a tuneful minuet:

The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans
The Germans hate the Poles

Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like
Anybody very much.

Polarization has been with us throughout recorded history. What is bringing it to crisis proportions in our era is a digitally connected world population being fed a stream of narratives that are constructed specifically and intentionally to exacerbate the problem. If we are going to navigate our way through this challenge, we need to get a better understanding of how polarization works and what it takes to depolarize.

How Polarization Works

Polarization begins when we embrace an opinion so deeply we incorporate it into our personal identity. It becomes part of the narrative we use to make sense of the world and our lives, and in this way becomes inseparable from our sense of self. An attack on such an opinion strikes at the very foundations of our personhood, something we hold inviolate, something we will defend to the death. This results in a “no-fly zone” of non-negotiability, a ring-fence that we will not allow to be breached.

Clearly, this is dangerous stuff, and we would all do well to avoid it altogether. Indeed, one way to think of spiritual enlightenment is to have grounded one’s identity in a state of being outside the realm of opinions. One still has opinions, but one controls them instead of having them control you. Unfortunately, but for a few saints and enlightened Buddhas, there are precious few of us who can claim that state. Most of us hold (or are held by) positions on one or more issues of contention that we simply refuse to entertain abandoning. That, let us say, is normal. But we need to understand, these are not positions of strength. They are not assets. They are liabilities. They make us vulnerable in all sorts of ways, some of which we might not appreciate or even detect.

Why do we do this? Our identities are anchored in narratives, stories we tell about ourselves and that others tell about us. They tell everyone including ourselves who we are. These narratives are organized around protagonists and antagonists. We seek to emulate the protagonists and defeat the antagonists. Now, the antagonists don’t have to be people. They can be challenges like crime or poverty or sickness or climate change. More often, however, they do end up being people, people we don’t know in all likelihood but who stand for the very things that we are so clearly against. The weird part about this is that they feel exactly the same way about us! But, how can that be? We are in the right, they are in the wrong, why don’t they see that? Instead, bizarrely, they are saying the same thing.

OK, this is pretty obviously a trap of our own making, and as adults, it is incumbent upon us to resist its effects as best we can. It is also clear that we come up short more often than one would like. So, for the time being, let us assume that some amount of polarization is a fact of life, and in that context, take stock of what that entails.

On a personal level, polarized beliefs make us susceptible to righteousness. We are deeply certain we are right and, when put under sufficient pressure, entitled to take whatever action we feel is necessary, even when that involves breaking the law. We have no interest in understanding our opponents or negotiating with them. We are in our very own “no-fly zone,” and we carry it with us wherever we go. This takes a toll on us but perhaps more importantly on our friends and family as well. They either have to capitulate and participate in our vision, or they have to skirt the issue altogether. Direct honest communication would require a level of vulnerability we are unwilling to entertain.

As citizens, polarized beliefs make us susceptible to political manipulation. Demagogues can engage our psyches by demonizing our antagonists, inflaming our righteousness with calls to action that speak to our very souls. We will bond with these leaders regardless of their histories because we are not interested in evidence, only validation. We unite with them around what is wrong and then allow them to define what is right as the destruction of what is wrong. It is a playbook that has been used throughout history, sad to say, because it is very, very effective. We see this in other people all the time. We need to see it in ourselves as well.

Next up: On Depolarization

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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