Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past [Hardcover]

Geoffrey A. Moore (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 6, 2011

“Readthis book to learn how to create a company as powerful as Apple.”—Guy Kawasaki,former chief evangelist of Apple

InEscape Velocity Geoffrey A. Moore, author of the marketing masterwork Crossingthe Chasm, teaches twenty-first century enterprises how to overcome thepull of the past and reorient their organizations to meet a new era ofcompetition. The world’s leading high-tech business strategist, Moore connectsthe dots between bold strategies and effective execution, with an action planthat elucidates the link between senior executives and every other branch of acompany. For readers of Larry Bossidy’s Execution,Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Solution, and Gary Vaynerchuck’sCrush It!, and for anyone aiming for the pinnacle of business success, EscapeVelocity is an irreplaceable roadmap to the top.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Read this book to learn how to create a company as powerful as Apple."--Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple

“A pragmatic framework to help mature enterprises escape the pull of their pasts and embrace the new reality of work.” (John Chen, CEO, Sybase )

From the Inside Flap

From the world's leading high-tech strategist comes the definitive road map to help established companies create next-generation growth.

Geoffrey Moore's now classic Crossing the Chasm became a must-read book by presenting an innovative frame work to address the make or break obstacle facing all high tech companies: how to gain market share from early adopters and from mainstream consumers.

Based on twenty years' experience advising the top leaders  of many of the world's most successful entereprises.  Moore's Escape Velocity offers a pragmatic plan to engage the most critical challenge that established enterprises face in the twenty-first-century economy: how to move beyond past success and drive next-generation growth from new lines of business. 

As he worked with senior management teams, Moore repeatedly found that executives were trapped by short-term performance-based compensation schemes.  The result was critical decision-makers overweighting their legacy commitments, an embarassingly low success rate in new-product launches, and widespread failure to sustain any kind of next-generation business at scale.

In Escape Velocity, Moore presents a cogent strategy for generating future growth within an established enterprise.  Organized a hierarchy of powers--category power, company power, market power, offer power and execution power--this insightful work shows how each level of power can be orchestrated to achieve overall success.  Moore explains

• how to use mergers and acquisitionsas well as organic innovation to systematically migrate an enterprise's portfolio out of lower-growth and into higher-growth categories;
• how to reallocate resources across an enterprise in deliberately asymmetrical ways to create a powerful and sustainable foundation for long-term competitive advantage;
• how to leverage target-market initiatives as accelerants to growth and as stepping-stones to broad overall category success;
• how to create unmatchable offerings by being swift to neutralize competitors' innovations and laser-focused on driving in-house innovations to make a business imperious to competitors;
• how to fundamentally change the execution cadence of an organizations, pushing change from innovation to broad deployment, creating an irreversible tipping point along the way.

Escape Velocity Copyright 2011 by Geoffrey A. Moore.  All rights reserved.  Printed in the United States of America.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.  For information, address HarperCollins Publishers 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational business, or sales promotional use.  For information, please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

First Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN:  978-0-06-204089-3

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness (September 6, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062040898
• ISBN-13: 978-0062040893
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #28,396 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Managing Director, Geoffrey Moore Consulting
Venture Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Chairman Emeritus, TCG Advisors, Chasm Institute, and Chasm Group
Member of the Board of Directors, Akamai Technologies and several pre-IPO Companies

Geoffrey 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!.

Geoffrey divides his time between consulting on strategy and transformation challenges with senior executives and speaking internationally on those same topics. His latest book Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past, keeps this intent in mind and is the result of his years of experience working with large enterprises.

Escape Velocity is Moore's sixth book for business leaders in the high-tech sector. His first book, Crossing the Chasm, which addresses the challenges of gaining initial adoption for disruptive innovations, continues to be a best seller and required reading in business schools and entrepreneurship curricula. Moore wrote four subsequent books which addressed the challenges faced by management when competing in hyper-growth markets (Inside the Tornado) and those faced by investors when managing a high-tech stock portfolio (The Gorilla Game). The two additional books both address the organizational challenges faced by established enterprises, in one case posed by the volatility of the technology sector overall (Living on the Fault Line), in the other by the need to reignite innovation in mature franchises (Dealing with Darwin). Escape Velocity rounds out these efforts in service to established enterprises by laying out a comprehensive program for engaging with next-generation trends while maintaining their core franchises.

Moore is an active public speaker who gives between 30 and 60 speeches per year, split roughly evenly between industry events and company-specific meetings. His speaking practice is global, addressing a spectrum of topics of interest to the high-tech sector, including high-tech market dynamics, business strategies, innovation, organizational development, and industry futures.

Earlier in his career, he was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high tech marketing strategy and communications company, and for the decade prior, a sales and marketing executive in the software industry. He has a bachelor's degree from Stanford and a doctorate from the University of Washington, both in English Literature.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The tools and points of view your company needs to get the right strategies for innovation and growth September 13, 2011

By Mark P. McDonald TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Escape Velocity by Geoffrey Moore addresses the fundamental issue of driving deep innovation and value realization in your company not by some new silver bullet but by the hard work required to free your company's future from its past. Moore's central premise in this well written, actionable and highly recommended book, is that companies have a structural bias for investing in things today that cause it to starve out the new products and services that will generate growth in the next 2 -3 years.

Moore is a well-established innovator, thinker and marketing expert in the Silicon Valley. His prior books like Crossing the Chasm, Dealing with Darwin, etc. are foundational in the tech industry. This book leverages these prior works, but it does not require you to have read them. Suggestion if you are looking to read a companion work I would suggest Crossing the Chasm as it is related to the topics discussed in Escape Velocity. This book is not a rehash of his market adoption model. Rather it is a new set of tools concerning how you think about, develop and execute new strategies that break you out of last year plus 10% thinking.

What makes this book highly recommended is that Moore offers a broad set of tools that work outside of tech to give executives and leaders real tools that they need right now. This book is a model for a business book that is actionable, practical and deep enough to help you apply the ideas while still being engaging and interesting.

The book organizes itself around a hierarchy of powers that together shape a market, companies competing in that market and the products and services they offer in that market. The powers are:

Category Power - the demand for a class of products, for example smart phones, fuel-efficient cars, or energy bars.

Company Power - the relative status and prospect for your company compared with peers. For example: Nokia vs. Samsung, Honda vs. Ford, Cliff vs. Kashi

Market Power - the company's power relative to a market segment, for example Subway in Quick Service Restaurants.

Offer Power - the demand for a product or service relative to reference competitors. The classic here is Whopper vs. Big Mac.

Execution Power - the ability to outperform competitors under equal conditions

The remaining chapters in the book concentrate on each of these powers, what they are, how they work, tools for applying them and at least two specific case studies that illustrate their importance. Put all of this together and you get a powerful and actionable playbook for creating new market strategies.

Moore does surprisingly little pontification on market strategies, something common in other marketing related books. Instead he shows you via 13 tools that you can use found in each of the powers. To give you an example of the completeness of this book, here is a list of the tools it contains:

Category Power
- Category maturity lifecycle
- Growth/Maturity Matrix
- Horizon model

Company Power
- Competitive separation
- Two-business architecture model
- Crown Jewels model

Marketing Power
- Nine point market strategy framework

Offer power
- Retain or innovate model
- Six levers model
- Price/Benefit model
- Core/context model

Execution Power
- The arc of execution

Listing all of these models may give the impression that the book is more of an encyclopedia or compendium than a book that makes an actionable argument. Nothing could be further from reality. Moore uses his experience, the central thesis of the book and case studies to describe why certain things have happened, why leaders made different decisions and the results of those decisions.

Moore finishes the book with a discussion of how you use these tools to transform you execution, vision or strategy. This brings the toolset together and demonstrates that these tools work in practice rather than in theory.

Escape Velocity is a culmination of Moore's other works. Rather than simply restating them in today's context, Moore is sharing the fundamental tools leaders can use to develop and execute their company's strategies. This is one of those rare books that should be purchased, studied, annotated and tried in your company. Not every tool will fit, but the book gives you enough support such that you can make that judgment for yourself.

This sounds like a gushing review, this book has been one of the best I have read in 2011, but it does have some flaws. The examples and cases concentrate on high-tech, which may turn off some. The requirement for a leader that is willing to make asymmetric investments in new products and services is true, but under developed in the book. The book covers Moore's personal experience, which will make some see it as a digital infomercial. I believe these weak points exist, but this book is more than worth your time and attention.

A suggestion, buy the hardcopy as you will be making notes throughout the book, dog earing pages, etc. I read it on an eReader, which is great, but now using it as a reference is not the same as a hard copy. You will use this book as a future reference.

Highly Recommended for any business executive who feels that their current strategy has lost its potency, punch and ability to drive sales

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Advice for B2B Sr. Executives July 30, 2012

By Gene Morphis

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Geoffrey Moore is a very successful author and has also started multiple consulting and speaking businesses. He is also a partner in a venture capital firm. Mr. Moore writes extensively about strategy and marketing, particularly in technology markets.

In Escape Velocity Mr. Moore sets up circumstances in which businesses struggle with a transition from existing products and services to the products and services that will replace them.

I have two quick observations: first, this book is clearly about business-to-business marketing. If you are in the B2B space, there are some lessons here, but this book clearly is not aimed at you. Second, since Mr. Moore is involved with tech companies, his examples are almost exclusively tech examples. Not so narrow as not to be interesting, but perhaps limited for readers who are in, say, insurance or construction.

Moore's theme is that there is a hierarchy of strategy, which he labels powers. (It is my interpretation that these are strategy equivalents). Specifically and in order: Category Power, Company Power, Market Power, Offer Power and Execution Power. He sets up his argument with examples of enterprises where strong legacy products exist and the enterprise gets the majority of its cash flow from those. Some more forward-thinking members of the firm envision the next generation product and begin scratching for resources to advance those. In his view as presented in this book, far too many firms are too reluctant or at least too slow to free up the best people and adequate capital to support the new. The old-world firm that I would point to as the exemplar of the opposite is Gillette, which has steadily and relentlessly pushed its lead in razors and razor blades, cannibalizing the old product.

The chapters after the set-up describe each of the five "powers" with prescriptions on how to fight organization inertia and obtain adequate funding to identify the most promising new products and harvest the old.

Overall, I would describe this as a useful management book. More relevant for tech space readers, and most relevant for B2B tech space readers.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars 1 Star for Kindle/Video/Publisher - 4 Stars for the book content August 21, 2012

By G. Morrison

Format:Kindle Edition with Audio/Video|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am reading the book now so I haven't completed it. However, I have skimmed through it and I am now doing a serious reading. It is a very good book. I can't give it 5 stars because for me it is not an excellent book - just very good ;-)

The 1 Star is for the really shoddy implementation on Kindle with respect to the videos. I actually decided on Kindle verses Hardcover just for the videos (I hate the publisher pricing on Kindle that makes the e-book nearly as expensive as the hard cover. In those situations, I stay away from the e-book and have Amazon ship me the Hard cover for free). I realize that the videos are exclusive to Apple products - something that makes no sense whatsoever considering my PC and Android tablet can handle the video codecs just fine. But the videos DO NOT work on my iPhone 3G. I get video but no sound. So basically, a useless video and download. The e-book does not work as advertised and is therefore a defective product.

Amazon definitely has the technical chops to do this right. But they didn't. So I have to rate my experience with this book as low. I would have given it 1 Star as the lowest common denominator but that isn't fair to the author. The publisher and Amazon are at fault.