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Living on the Fault Line: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any Economy Kindle Edition
Geoffrey A. Moore (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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The fault line -- that dangerous, unstable seam in the economy where powerful innovations and savage competition meet and create market-shattering tremors. Every company lives on it; no manager can control it.
In the original edition of Living on the Fault Line, Geoffrey Moore presented a compelling argument for using shareholder value (or share price) as the key driver in management decisions. Moore now revisits his argument in the post-Internet bubble world, proving that the methods he espouses are more germane than ever and showing companies how to use them to survive and thrive in today's demanding economy.
Extending the themes of Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, his first two books on the dynamics of the high-tech markets, Moore shows why sensitivity to stock price is the single most important lever for managing in the future, both as a leading indicator of shifts in competitive advantage and as an employee motivator for making necessary changes in organizations heretofore impervious to change.
This revised and updated edition includes:
- A deeper emphasis on core versus context, which has emerged as the key distinction in allocating resources to improve shareholder value
- A new Competitive Advantage Grid that will aid managers in achieving and sustaining competitive advantage, the most important component in managing for shareholder value
- An expanded Value Discipline Model as it relates to the Competitive Advantage Grid
- Analysis of the powerful new trend toward core/context analysis and outsourcing production duties
- Updated models of organizational change for each stage of market development
As disruptive forces continue to buffet the marketplace and rattle the staid practices of the past, Moore offers a brilliant set of navigational tools to help meet today's most compelling management challenges.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateOctober 13, 2009
- File size1310 KB
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About the Author
Geoffrey A. Moore is the author of Escape Velocity, Inside the Tornado, and Living on the Fault Line.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.Product details
- ASIN : B000FC12MI
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; Revised edition (October 13, 2009)
- Publication date : October 13, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1310 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 304 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,701,455 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and advisor who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolios and established high-tech enterprises, most recently including Salesforce, Microsoft, Autodesk, F5Networks, Gainsight, Google, and Splunk.
Moore’s life’s work has focused on the market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations. His first book, Crossing the Chasm, focuses on the challenges start-up companies face transitioning from early adopting to mainstream customers. It has sold more than a million copies, and its third edition has been revised such that the majority of its examples and case studies reference companies come to prominence from the past decade. Moore’s latest business-related work, Zone to Win, addresses the challenge large enterprises face when embracing disruptive innovations, even when it is in their best interests to do so. It’s time to stop explaining why they don’t and start explaining how they can. This has been the basis of much of his recent consulting.
In a significant departure from Moore’s lifetime of business-related consulting, Moore uses his expertise at creating frameworks and applies it to the meaning of life itself and the big question, “What is going on?”. His latest book, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality, offers readers a complete look at how the universe has evolved and our ethical place within it. As Moore says in the book, “Our core sense of good and bad does not come from above. It is neither transcendent nor divine. Rather, it is inherent in our mammalian upbringing.”
Irish by heritage, Moore has yet to meet a microphone he didn’t like and gives between 50 and 80 speeches a year. One theme that has received a lot of attention recently is the transition in enterprise IT investment focus from Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement. This is driving the deployment of a new cloud infrastructure to complement the legacy client-server stack, creating massive markets for a next generation of tech industry leaders.
Moore has a bachelors in American literature from Stanford University and a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington. After teaching English for four years at Olivet College, he came back to the Bay Area with his wife and family and began a career in high tech as a training specialist. Over time he transitioned first into sales and then into marketing, finally finding his niche in marketing consulting, working first at Regis McKenna Inc, then with the three firms he helped found: The Chasm Group, Chasm Institute, and TCG Advisors. Today he is chairman emeritus of all three.
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This revised version has the expected mea culpa in the Preface, deletes and replaces chapter 1 of the previous addition, and focuses on what is really valuable in Moore's work. The new chapter 1 highlights Moore's GAP-CAP distinction. GAP (Competitive-Advantage Gap) is what shows up in the numbers, differential success in the here-and-now marketplace. CAP (Competitive-Advantage Period) is a more subtle concept, referring to the ability of a company to sustain its advantages against competitors over time. It underpins future competitive advantage. The combination of a company's GAP and CAP is the real driver of its share price (discounted future earnings), and therefore of shareholder value. Moore write persuasively and in some detail about how this all works.
Chapter 2 explores the second important idea, the CORE-CONTEXT distinction. Here Core is defined as those activities which are central to the company's marketplace differentiation: effective action here directly impacts the share price. Context activities are those which need to be done, and done well, but which the market gives you little credit for. Administrative HR, for example, in companies which are not HR specialists. Moore argues that these are candidates for outsourcing to companies for whom they ARE core competencies. Again Moore elaborates on these basic distinctions.
Subsequent chapters explain the "Competitive Advantage Grid", which is new in this version. Here, the standard analysis of competitive advantage (product leadership vs. customer-focus vs. price/operational excellence - with a new category for disruptive innovation) is cross-referenced to strategies for marketplace differentiation to create a 4 x 4 matrix on which your company can be placed.
The remaining part of the book returns to Moore's familiar themes of the evolution-model of technology-based markets: early-market, chasm, bowling-alley, tornado, main-street. Moore is looking to integrate some of his ideas from the early part of the book into this framework, with a fair degree of success. He closes by discussing business cultures and "culture management", but here the theoretical framework is noticeably weaker. William Bridge's recently re-issued "The Character of Organizations" is a useful complement to what Moore has to say, here.
Overall, I think this book has its greatest value as a conceptual framework for strategic marketing and corporate strategy in hi-tech. I have personally found its ideas extraordinarily useful in telecoms. Reviewers of Moore's earlier books have indicated that some non-trivial work has to be done to apply these ideas to concrete cases. Clearly, some of Moore's rather black and white recommendations have to be nuanced in practice, but as an accessible business strategy primer for the 21st century, I would say this book is essential.
While many of these items are similar to the earlier edition, this revised edition goes beyond the internet bubble to address the concerns in any tough economy where the investor perspective becomes increasingly demanding and dominant.
Moore explains that the business in the 21st century is changing requiring investment to incorporate the enabling technology that is becoming increasingly widespread and significant as well as the specialization of work that is becoming necessary to succeed. He also addresses the need for companies to focus on their "core" business functions and take care of the context in other ways, e.g. use of services, outsourcing, and so on.
While Moore has primarily concerned himself with the technology sector, his insights in this book have relevance for all sectors and it remains a classic for helping clarify business strategy and direction.
With change increasing exponentially, we are living in an environment where understanding and dealing with change is increasingly difficult. While Moore's approach towards competition is traditional, he does provide tools for understanding the apparent chaos in today's environment.
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