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Inside the Tornado, Geoffrey Moore.

Geoffrey Moore’s Inside The Tornado offers a modified application of the value disciplines described in Treacy’s & Wiersema’s, The Discipline of Market Leaders. Treacy and Wiersema describe the benefits that arise for companies that identify and focus on a value discipline. These value disciplines include Operational Excellence, Product Leadership and Customer Intimacy. Moore’s proposition is that these value disciplines should change as a market matures. In Chapter 8, Competitive Advantage, Moore takes these value disciplines a dimension further and combines them with distinctions of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Moore adds his own distinctions to this life cycle. He identifies and characterizes different stages of the life cycle and describes how the value disciplines might change in different stages.

The Technology Adoption Life Cycle, invented approximately 40 years ago, describes the various stages of marketplace response to discontinuous innovations or more simply, technological change. The Life Cycle is depicted as a bell curve. Each segment or stage is represented by different market conditions and typical customers ranging from technology visionaries at the early stage, pragmatists and conservatives in the middle and skeptics in the final stage. Moore’s distinctions include different stages of the life cycle progressively labeled as:

Moore asserts that the each of these stages call for different value disciplines or combinations of disciplines. This is a critical difference. Treacy & Wiersema’s proposition has a static nature. Moore suggests that value disciplines need to change as the marketplace matures.As an example, Moore asserts that the singularly most important value discipline at the earliest stage of technology adoption is product leadership. It is product leadership that the technology visionary values. The radical change a new technology offers allows previous bottlenecks or obstacles to be bypassed. Because it is still early, the product can be customized to the visionary’s idiosyncrasies.

Getting over The Chasm, (Moore’s make or break period for a product) and into The Bowling Alley, the surviving product benefits from an emphasis on the value disciplines of Product Leadership and Customer Intimacy. The critical success factor here is providing a “whole” product. Because the product is a leader in the market it is differentiated from the status quo. The product is further differentiated as “whole” because it attends to the all of the needs of the customer in a particular market niche.

The Tornado is the period of rapid growth; the steepest area of ascent in The Technology Adoption Life Cycle bell curve. This is the period of sweeping, mass market adoption of a product. It is in this stage that the value disciplines of Product Leadership and Operational Excellence are paramount. Product Leadership here shows up as a company’s capacity to set the product standard. Operation excellence is critical in The Tornado as a company strives to keep up with the demand for the product.

At the pinnacle of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle or Main Street, Moore suggests that Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy should be the predominant value disciplines. This is the first stage where the value discipline of Product Leadership is no longer critical. Main Street is a period of market development, the goal being to “flesh out” the market’s potential. The product is approaching a commodity purchase and companies seek the lower costs Operational Excellence allows. Customer Intimacy is demonstrated with added value product offerings for niche markets. An example of this might be Hewlett Packard co-marketing their computer printer with a special software package. Product Leadership as a value discipline here is a risky proposition. The maturity of the market and the competition make Product Leadership a short-lived and tenuous position.

Geoffrey Moore shows up as an important speaker in the computer industry. After being introduced to his latest book through the Sales Professional’s Course, I have heard others reference his work. Toby Hecht has invited Geoffrey Moore to speak at the All-SPC conference this June. In the last two months, I have had my most significant customer reference Moore. Two Product Managers from separate companies, one responsible for launching an electronic bill payment system and another initiating the development of new electronic or intemet based commerce have also referenced Moore’s work recently. What I interpret from this is that Geoffrey Moore is a speaker in the world who’s thinking and distinction directly impact my world.