The differences among zones in terms of investment horizon, performance metrics, and operating cadence are so great that each warrants its own local playbook, with no zone being permitted to impose its local playbook onto any of the other three. At the same time, however, all four zones do need to interoperate with each other fluidly if the overall enterprise is to win its game. Thus there does need to be an uber-playbook to govern them all, what we are calling the Zone Offense. Optimise second: Given the new value proposition in the market and your ability in the short term to match it, you have little choice but to reduce your prices . Most big companies are terrible at this. They try to use the existing go-to-market infrastructure to launch and scale the new innovation. It doesn’t’ work. It creates conflicts of interest with the performance zone.

Coasting in the Productivity Zone. Initiatives in this zone are for the most part neither disruptive nor mission-critical, so it is easy to get a bit complacent about performance here. Again, absent a transformational initiative, all you’re likely to be giving up are a few hundred basis points of EPS. But once a transformation is under way, you will put so much pressure on the Performance Zone, the only way you can succeed is with an exceptional contribution from your enabling initiatives. If the Productivity Zone is not up to the task, you are not going to get up to the bar. The four main zones that Moore identifies each get a chapter of their own in the book, and indeed we’ll look at them in closer detail later on. In the meantime, here’s a brief overview of each of the four zones and how they might impact your business. Zone #1: The Performance Zone Last summer over lunch with the CTO & co-founder of Care.com, Dave Krupinski, we got to talked about the challenge of managing new products innovation inside an existing growing business. Dave, a former colleague from Easel days, had done what every entrepreneur dreams of doing: building his idea into a successful, growing and long lasting public company. While I was still a long way from a public company, my business was in a high growth phase that made the topic particularly relevant to me. As we discussed our respective innovation challenges, Dave suggested I read a book called Zone To Win by Geoffrey Moore. The incubation zone – This is a birthing area for new ideas. Similar to a venture capitalist the incubation zone is where you have a portfolio of nascent innovations that may turn into disruptors themselves (offense). Or may be co-opted to help defend the performance business (defense). In the meantime, we hope that the lessons we’ve shared today have helped you to get the most out of your business by rethinking your approaches to the four different zones. Remember that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach: instead, you’ll need to use the insights that Moore shares to identify strategies that make sense to your business.Final thing to note here: the language of the book is not always clear. The author uses a number of obscure phrases and sentences that do not really fit into the context. Furthermore, there are cases

It turns out, to disrupt someone else’s business, you have to add a net new line of business to your own portfolio. The practices seem practical and like a mashup of all the popular all-or-nothing approaches for the last few decades, just more precisely applied into more appropriate contexts. That’s the kind of advice I’ve built for my teams for my whole life. To me that means the practices could probably work. But that might be confirmation bias speaking. If the practices don’t work though, the final chapter speaks to the biggest power of the book though: a common language. Getting everyone to speak the same language for these ideas is a massive win even if nobody can agree on what to do. Even from such a cursory review of these four zones, it should be clear that their individual goals, objectives, and methods are so diverse that any set of management methods creating success in one zone is likely to cause failure in the other three. That is why it is so important to keep them separate. At the same time, all four need to work in tandem to make the corporation go. Here’s what a successful Zone Offense looks like: At the core of modern businesses’ challenge to engage and absorb wave after wave of disruptive digital technology lies the problem of how best to allocate resources across three investment horizons. Each is defined in terms of when the return on that investment will be realized:The productivity zone – this zone is all the tools and enhancements that squeeze revenue and profit out of the performance zone. What defensive investments can you make to fend of disruptions to your existing business? How can you optimize? Even at this early stage, you need an entrepreneur, a single point of accountability for delivering the sum of all future outcomes.

This how the company prioritizes investment. Horizon one is where we have performance and optimization of the current operating goals. Investments in Horizon two consist scaling an innovation to be a significant contributor in 2-3 years. Investments in Horizon three create the inventory of those investments. I’ll now follow with a short description of the different zones, as much for my own memory as anything else: The question you want to answer at the outset, therefore, is whether you are being disrupted at the level of your infrastructure model, your operating model, or your business model. Geoffrey Moore makes his living creating new frameworks in business that rationally explain company and market behavior, then using these frameworks to mine epiphanies for we lesser souls. Moore certainly has the pedigree and the expertise that you need to write a book like this. He’s been in the business for over 25 years and has already established himself as one of the most acclaimed and experienced tech advisors in the world. The story goes that Conan O’Brien once said, “Who is Geoffrey Moore and why is he more famous than me?”

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This is indeed a sad state of affairs. To remediate it there are three essential steps that must be taken:

Because we are living in what can be called ‘the disruption economy’. There are waves of new and disruptive technologies assailing today’s companies. Disruption has been around forever but today is different. The disruptions are coming faster and with greater magnitude. While the rating tells you how good a book is according to our two core criteria, it says nothing about its particular defining features. Therefore, we use a set of 20 qualities to characterize each book by its strengths: Zone to Win primarily focuses on larger organizations. It uses Microsoft and Salesforce as two key case studies. However, the principles of the zones (and the three horizons framework) are useful for any size business and for many of us. One thing to note before we get started is that Zone to Win is designed to be a companion to Moore’s Escape Velocity, and while you don’t need to read it to get the most out of this book, it’ll certainly be a nice little bonus. Here, he’s focussing much more on offering the advice that people need when they’re adding a new line of business to an existing portfolio. Moore says it’s “focussed on spurring next-generation growth, guiding mergers and acquisitions, and embracing disruption and innovation” and explains, “Zone to Win is a high-powered tool for driving your company above and beyond its limitations, its definitions of success, and ultimately, its competitors.”The incubation and transformation zones are what’s potentially new to a company. The incubation one is a way for companies to isolate and nurture innovation so that it too has clarity and investment without getting in the way of the performance zone.