Book Review: Zone to Win by Geoffrey A. Moore
My Rating: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀, a must read for Corporate Venturing
Overall: A fantastic, high-level, view of how you prioritise, structure and set goals for a venturing framework, within a mature organisation.
Cautions: This book is not interspersed with anecdotal stories, some of the content may take a few reads but its worth it!
Recommended readers: Senior Managers > C-Suite
Geoffrey Moore pinpoints something you won’t read in most anecdote led innovation books, you have to have a clear understanding of your priorities when running corporate ventures.
Mature companies benefit from the inertia of their core businesses, leaders shouldn’t mess with that, it’s your cash cow but that cow is travelling along a product life-cycle and eventually, it will die. And so Geoffrey introduces the prioritisation tool of “Horizons”, as a framing device to clearly time-bound the benefit initiative types should deliver.
Horizon 1: Enhancement to the Current Cash Cow
Horizon 2: Finding the next Cash Cow
Horizon 3: Uncovering a new species of Cash Cow
Return metrics — can be a tricky point when it comes to speculative innovation but Geoffrey clearly binds his approach to the realities of an operating business, you can’t wait forever to get a return. And so his model gives a 6 year limit for future category returns but is fed by 0–12 month, 12–36-month activities that are actively reinforcing the core business. This is a sustaining beat rate of wins across all three horizons. NOT JUST IN QUARTER. [Note: this is clearly an adaptation of Steve Coley’s 3 Horizons of Growth]
Zones — which are the core of the book, split the activities neatly into:
Incubation: New stuff, protect it from the corporate immune system and clearly plan for a journey to the Performance zone as a scaled business unit or offering.
Transformation: Scaling to a material size [target size: 10% of existing revenues], growing a customer base, building a sustainable business model and getting ready to implant into the Performance Zone as a stand-alone unit[or if it fails, spin it out and sell it]. Key Principle, only do 1 at a time and throw the full organisation’s weight behind it!
Performance: your Cash Cow, the established core that pays the bills, don’t break it and don’t try and disrupt it. This is the reason you’re alive as a company. Focus on activities here that enhance and optimise only.
Productivity: operational efficiency, focus on activities that optimise all the other zones.
Funding innovation — The book goes a little awry with Independent Operating Units and funding methods, these lack examples and so it gets a little dry but the principle of gated funding that mirrors the VC market is a great way to think about how capital is deployed internally.
Now go grab a copy and message me if you’d like to discuss further!
