HOW DOES YOUR COMPANY ACHIEVE ESCAPE VELOCITY?

Written by best-selling author Geoffrey Moore, Escape Velocity gives executives and their teams a roadmap to overcome the pull of the past and reorient their organizations toward a new era of competition. It offers a pragmatic plan to address 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.

At a time when the world is looking to established enterprises for growth and stability, many of today's market leaders are struggling to simultaneously optimize their current businesses and successfully grow their way into new ones. Escape Velocity provides a new model for how to drive profitable growth in the face of ongoing industry and economic disruptions.

Escape Velocity addresses a “power deficit” in established enterprises that holds them captive to their legacy franchises and renders them unable to capitalize on next-generation opportunities. It traces this deficit to a performance-oriented management culture that drives accountability for financial results without establishing equivalent responsibility for replenishing competitive advantage. In this context, enterprises continually drawdown their reserves of power to fuel the current quarter’s results while failing to stake out future positions of power to drive next-generation growth.

This behavior is deeply embedded in the established norms and practices of global businesses. Escape Velocity provides a new model called the Hierarchy of Powers to overcome these challenges. This model is built on our work over two decades helping high-tech companies reset strategy and execution to capitalize on market transitions. It is comprised of five types of power, all of which must be aligned to achieve Escape Velocity:

1. Category Power, achieved through proactively entering and exiting categories to participate meaningfully in the highest growth opportunities;
2. Company Power, achieved through highly asymmetrical allocations of resources to create “unmatchable” core capabilities;
3. Market Power, achieved through targeting the most strategic customer segments and skewing offers and programs to ensure winning dominant shares in each;
4. Offer Power, achieved through disentangling three distinct forms of innovation one from another, managing each separately, to achieve differentiation, competitive neutralization, and internal productivity respectively; and
5. Execution Power, with specific attention on transformational initiatives that realign the company around the next-generation capabilities required to execute its strategy.

Escape Velocity pulls no punches in calling out the misconceptions and behaviors that trap enterprises into decaying franchises while being empathetic about the challenges involved and pragmatic about how best to address them. The result is a book centered right at the intersection of strategy and execution, the crucible in which next-generation successes and failures are formed.