Printable Biography of Geoffrey Moore

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Geoffrey Moore is the Chairman, Founder and Managing Partner of a consulting practice that provides marketing strategy and organizational services to many leading high-technology companies as well as to those in other sectors. Moore is also a Venture Partner with a California-based venture capital firm specializing in specific technology markets, including e-commerce, Internet, enterprise software, networking and semiconductors. In this latter role, as a venture partner at a leading “VC” firm, he provides market strategy advice to their high-tech portfolio companies.

Moore’s most recent book, Living on the Fault Line was published in a revised edition in the summer of 2002. This edition focuses on managing for shareholder value in any economy including the current “age of anxiety.” In line with this focus, Moore’s current practice is focused around the Fault Line methodology and his specialty is presenting and analyzing the core versus context model described in chapter two – core being anything that contributes directly to competitive differentiation and leads to customer preference in purchase decisions. Context is everything else – all the things that you or your company or product must do to pass muster but which do not differentiate you from others in the same market. Likewise, the key lesson for investors is that the New Economy, with the help of the Internet, enables companies as never before to outsource their context in order to focus on their core enterprises.

Moore has written three other books. Perhaps most notably, he is the author of Crossing the Chasm, one of the most influential business books of the twentieth century, in which he introduces readers to a gap or “chasm” which innovative companies and their products must cross in order to reach the lucrative mainstream market. As a follow-up, Moore’s second book, Inside the Tornado, provides readers with insight into how to capitalize on the potential for hyper growth beyond the chasm, detailing the need for radical shifts in market strategy and prescribing appropriate tactics for succeeding in each stage of the cycle. The Gorilla Game is Moore’s third book, which he co-authored with Tom Kippola and Paul Johnson. It offers readers a coherent approach to high-tech investing and understanding of how to build a solid investment strategy around purchasing and holding stocks of what authors call “gorilla” companies.

Prior to founding The Chasm Group and his consulting practice, Moore was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high-tech marketing strategy and marketing communications company. For the decade prior, he was a sales and marketing executive at three different software companies: Rand Information Systems, Enhansys, and Mitem.

Moore holds an undergraduate degree in literature from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He has served as an English professor at Olivet College and is a frequent speaker and lecturer at industry conferences. His books are required reading at Stanford, Harvard, MIT and other leading business schools.

Most Requested Topics:

*Chasms, Bowling Alleys, Tornadoes, & Main Street: Marketing High Tech in the 21st Century: Drawing on his best-selling books, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado , Moore traces the path markets take through the Technology Adoption Life Cycle and explains what vendors must do to succeed at each stage.

*Darwin and the Demon: Innovating Within Established Enterprise: Caught between the Darwinistic forces of globalization and commoditization, and the demon of corporate inertia, established enterprises are increasingly challenged to innovate. Moore leverages his life cycle models to outline a broad range of innovation strategies and align them with a category’s current stage of market development.

*Core vs. Context: Reallocating Resources for Competitive Advantage: When processes no longer result in marketplace differentiation, they go from being core to context, but all too many continue to consume the bulk of an enterprise’s resources. Building on the material in his most recent best seller, Living on the Fault Line , Moore explains how the resulting decline in revenues and margins can be overcome through aggressive resource reallocation and human capital renewal.

*Outsourcing & Offshoring: Productivity, Perception, and Risk: Navigating the resources of the global economy is not for the faint of heart. But as competitive pressures increase, enterprises must find ways to leverage the work of others so that they can focus more and their unique value-adds. Drawing on recent consulting engagements with leading-edge firms, Moore outlines the current state of the art.

*Orchestrating the Stack: Next-Generation Strategies in Enterprise IT: Enterprise IT has consolidated around a handful of gorilla vendors, each of which is looking to increase its territory as computing architectures move beyond the current Internet-enabled client-server approach to a future platform built up from modular services and next-generation languages and protocols. Moore outlines each gorilla’s game plan to give CIOs and other interested industry observers an early start in handicapping this race.

*Provocation-Based Selling: How to Break-and-Enter Established Markets: Selling disruptive innovations requires a special approach as markets are self-organized to privilege incumbents and exclude challengers. The key is to win over the ever-elusive executive sponsor. Drawing on six years of experience as a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, Moore explains how start-ups have learned to get past the gatekeepers and capture the attention and support of line-of-business executives.

*Complex Systems vs. Volume Operations: The Challenges of Business Model Migration: As markets globalize, and current offerings commoditize, more and more companies are looking to changing business models as a source of new competitive advantage. But not all business models can cohabit in the same company. Drawing on recent consulting engagements with leading-edge firms, Moore surveys the landscape of business models and lays out rules of engagement for companies expanding into unexplored territory.

*Managing Company Culture--No Hot Tubs Required: While it is generally acknowledged that company culture has a huge impact on the success of enterprises, there have been few models that help executives understand and leverage culture as part of the management toolkit. Building on the material in his most recent best seller, Living on the Fault Line, Moore lays out models and methods for a no-nonsense approach to the topic that has deep implications for leadership and change management initiatives.

*Five Stages of Marketing Maturity: Where Is Your Organization? Based on twenty-five years of marketing experience in the high-tech sector, Moore lays out his Marketing Maturity Model, tracing the evolution of a start-up’s marketing from a nice home page to global domination. Along the way he gives audience members a complete set of diagnostics to see where their organization fits in the progression and what elements they might want to focus on next.

*Core vs. Context: The Primer: The core versus context model is described in chapter two of the book, Living on the Fault Line --core being anything that contributes directly to competitive differentiation and leads to customer preference in purchase decisions. Context is everything else--all the things that you or your company or product must do to pass muster but which do not differentiate you from others in the same market. The key lesson for investors is that the New Economy, with the help of the Internet, enables companies as never before to outsource their context in order to focus on their core enterprises.