Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution - Hardcover

Moore, Geoffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591841070 ISBN 13: 9781591841074

Publisher: Portfolio, 2005

Synopsis

Geoffrey Moore is one of the most respected and bestselling names in business books. In his widely quoted Crossing the Chasm, he identified and addressed the greatest challenge facing new ventures. Now he’s back with a book for established businesses that need to learn how to adapt—or suffer the slow declines into marginalized performance that have characterized so many Fortune 500 icons in recent years.

Deregulation, globalization, and e-commerce are exerting unprecedented pressures on company profits. In this new economic ecosystem, companies must dramatically differentiate from their direct competitors—or risk declining performance and eventual extinction. But how do companies choose the right innovation strategy? Or overcome internal inertia that resists the kind of radical commitments needed to truly set the company’s offers apart?

Illustrating his arguments with more than one hundred examples and a full-length case study based on his unprecedented access to Cisco Systems, Moore shows businesses how to meet today’s Darwinian challenges, whether they’re producing commodity products or customized services. For companies whose competitive differentiation to the marketplace is still effective, he demonstrates how innovations in execution can help boost productivity, whether a company is competing in a growth market, a mature market, or even a declining market. For companies in danger of succumbing to competitive pressures, he shows how to overcome inertia by engaging the entire corporate community in an unceasing commitment to innovate and evolve.

For any business competing in today’s eat-or-be-eaten economic jungle, this groundbreaking guide shows not only how to survive, but also thrive.

About this title

About the Author

Geoffrey A. Moore is the author of four bestselling business books: Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, and Living on the Fault Line. He is a managing director with TCG Advisors, a consulting firm specializing in strategy and business transformation services, and a venture partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures.

From Publishers Weekly

"Innovation" is one of the great buzzwords of management theory, but this treatise accords it a thoroughgoing analysis. Management consultant Moore, author of the bestselling Crossing the Chasm, argues that companies can escape the marginless hell of commodity and price competition only through innovations that differentiate their products from their competitors' in the minds of consumers. He elaborates a taxonomy of 15 "innovation types," from "disruptive" breakthrough technologies like Apple's iTunes to more mundane marketing innovations like hiring a sports superstar to endorse athletic shoes. Unlike many business futurists, Moore doesn't exalt innovation for its own sake, insisting it must be tied to concrete business goals. To help companies determine the right-and wrong-strategies for innovation, he develops an analytical framework that distinguishes emerging from mature market categories and "complex systems" companies that sell pricey customized projects to a few customers from "volume operations" companies that sell standardized products to the masses. Moore illustrates these ideas with real-world examples, biased toward tech-sector companies; an extended case study of innovation-management at networking leviathan Cisco Systems forms the backbone of the book. Moore's approach is somewhat theoretical and replete with diagrams that feature sine waves and fractals. Fortunately, his treatment remains lucid and commonsensical, and offers a wealth of insights for thoughtful managers.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Portfolio
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1591841070
• ISBN 13: 9781591841074
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304