Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption

Product Information

I’ll now follow with a short description of the different zones, as much for my own memory as anything else: Horizon #2: In two to three years, following significant negative cash flow in the intervening period, making it dilutive to the operating plan.

In sum, embracing disruptive innovation to transform an established enterprise is the single most unnatural act in all of business, a time when any principle of conventional management wisdom may not only be wrong but fatal. Of all the four playbooks needed to make the Four Zones model work, this is the one that requires the greatest amount of creative re-thinking. 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? First, on an emergency basis, you must race to modernize your existing operating model as best you can, incorporating enough of the next-generation technology to at least blunt the impact of the disruptor in the short term. Managing to Deal with Disrupting Innovation Once Moore! - I saw that this book had been issued earlier and finally got around to reading to see this advance in Moore’s thinking as one of my favorite management authors, e.g. his conceptual frameworks usually add fresh and useful insights into the introduction, management and impact of disruptive innovations.

Overview

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. 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 . Disruptive innovation — incubating or scaling new products or business opportunities — must be segregated from sustaining innovation — making improvements to existing entities. On the other hand, if you miss the wave, there’s no way to catch it later. You’re best off searching for another swell later on!

These can be either internally developed technologies or acquisitions. You are farming all of these innovations like a venture capitalist in the expectation that one of them is going to break out and make it big, perhaps once a decade. It’s like coaching a youth soccer team. Before they get coaching the kids all just chase the ball. To win they need to spread out and play positions, or zones of offense and defense. I watched a YouTube of Geoffrey Moore on Zone to Win a couple years ago, but reading the book gave me so much more insights of Moore's thought process behind the 4 zones and the offense/defense playbook.Horizon 3: In three to five years, consisting primarily of research and development that is funded so as not to be dilutive to the operating plan. It represents a business opportunity that has the potential to scale to material size, the minimum threshold being 10 percent of total enterprise revenue at the time when it reaches scale, This is the place for ideas which are several years out. The ideas in the incubation zone should not be incremental of what you have currently (this is for the performance zone), these are for things which could grow into being their own credible disruptive innovation delivering billions of dollars of revenue within a decade. In the incubation zone it should build a highly competitive product into a bussiness with between 1-2% of the companies revenue, so this needs the best people. These are businesses in their own rights with specialist sales, marketing and competitive services to compete against other startups. 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 can alter the way you are currently doing things, in new business models, in new systems, structures and delivery. It points you to a new, hopefully preferable future, worthwhile to pursue and attractive. It refreshes, it can invigorate and this horizon holds the keys and transition path to realizing that vision laid out in the ideas forming in horizon three.

Each zone needs to be managed differently, with its own leadership, goals and constraints. Trying to manage an emerging product in the Transformation Zone with the same approach as the Performance Zone will lead to failure. Equally important is to not try to subject your organization to frequent and unnecessary transformations, which will serve to take away your focus on the Performance and Productivity Zones required for business success. I don’t know how to reconcile that each manager must have a KPI in only one of the four zones, but can manage their own zone as a smaller 4-zone setup. He doesn’t really explain. Shouldn’t those be incompatible?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: These horizon (h2) concepts being explored really do need ‘ring fencing,’ so you can protect these from all the ‘vested’ claims that your horizon one focus will continually demand to keep, so as to bring in the results in this calendar year. It is a real fight, these ideas or nascent concepts ‘give off’ negative results, they are still a mix of the tangible and intangibles where you can’t get the ‘hard’ fix on the ROI, on their real market value or potential. When a go-to-market organization is charged to scale two or more new franchises while at the same time being expected to make the numbers in the established lines of business, anyone with experience knows this is simply not going to happen."