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

“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.

This essential guide for senior executives lays out a new playbook for corporate strategy:

• The Hierarchy of Powers: Master a five-level framework—from Category Power to Execution Power—to diagnose challenges and align your entire organization for market leadership.
• Strategic Portfolio Management: Apply the Three Horizons model to escape the innovator’s dilemma, rebalance your company’s portfolio, and fund the next generation of growth.
• Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Learn how to make asymmetrical bets on your company’s crown jewels to create unmatchable offers that leave the competition behind.
• High-Impact Execution: Go beyond theory with a concrete action plan that connects bold strategies with effective execution, ensuring your vision becomes a reality from the top down.

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 framework 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 enterprises, 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 embarrassingly low success rate in new-product launches, and a 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 around 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 acquisitions as 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 a 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 impervious to competitors;
• how to fundamentally change the execution cadence of an organization, pushing change from innovation to broad deployment, creating an irreversible tipping point along the way.

Drawing from thousands of hours spent face-to-face with CEOs and their teams, Moore presents case examples and best practices. While his experience is deeply rooted in the high-tech sector, his models and techniques apply well beyond this arena, including to the public sector.

At a time when the world is looking to established enterprises for growth and stability, Moore’s analysis is penetrating and his prescriptions are right on the mark. Escape Velocity gives executives and their teams a practical way forward to take advantage of the opportunities amid industry and economic disruptions.

“A pragmatic framework to help mature enterprises escape the pull of their pasts and embrace the new reality of work.” - Bill Nuti, CEO, NCR

“Insight and wisdom for every student of business.” - George Conrades, Chairman, Akamai

“Moore delivers the practical playbook and tools to help your enterprise change trajectory, increase performance, and break the status quo.” - Robert Beauchamp, Chairman and CEO, BMC

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

“Escape Velocity resets the bar for management strategy texts. Think Michael Porter meets Peter Drucker. This book is a game changer.” - Rob Tarkoff, EVP, Adobe

“Read this book to learn how to create a company as powerful as Apple. Geoffrey shows that Moore is more: more clear thinking, more alignment with customers, and more go-to-market goodness. If you don’t read this, don’t blame Geoffrey or me if you crash and burn.” - Guy Kawasaki, author and 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.” - Frank D'Souza, CEO, Cognizant