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

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And, revenue performance — financial commitments from the more established parts of the business — must be separated from enabling investments — funding and resourcing new product and business opportunities. As an established enterprise, your number-one asset is the inertial momentum of your installed customer base. Your number-two asset is an ecosystem of partners that makes its living adding value to your established offerings 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.

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. When budgeting these functions should be separate from the budget for other bussiness units since all other zones use their function – each bussiness unit should not need to estimate how much of the shared service they will use. I'd give it 5 stars but for 2 small complaints - really just areas for improvement in future editions (I hope): It embodies a disruptive innovation that can drive a 10x improvement in a performance metric of great importance to the target market.

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The rows must be >10% of the revenue to be taken seriously. As such only things in the performance zone are present here. We not only need to envision our future and the part we want to play within it but need a clear approach to working through the challenges and tensions to achieving a real balance in our innovation portfolio that work towards the same goal of being a material part of the business.

None of these four local playbooks is likely to be unfamiliar to you. There are no radical prescriptions in zone management. Rather, what is radical is, first, for executive management to explicitly distribute operations across the four zones and to seek different outcomes within each one, and second, for operational leaders to play within their assigned zones, following the playbook appropriate to each one and collaborating respectfully with other members of the enterprise who are executing different playbooks in other zones. To play offensive in the transformation zone, Moore suggests taking an independent business unit from the incubation zone and repositioning it as a line of business in the performance zone. Playing defence is even harder, and Moore suggests that there can often be a clash in which your investors’ immediate interests aren’t aligned with your customers’ best interests, which isn’t a sustainable situation. And while all of this is happening, you might find yourself facing disruption from elsewhere in the market.Very good book full of management wisdom. I read this book as per recommendation of my friend from EO (eonetwork.org) and due to business related organisational issue. Before reading this book I was adept of all-rounded CEOs who would do both - achieve great operational results and open new products/markets. When IOUs fail to reach a milestone, they will often warrant getting a second chance. They normally will not deserve a third. 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.