Geoffrey Moore

Biography

Geoffrey Moore is the Chairman, Founder and Managing Partner of TCG Advisors (TCG-A), a consulting practice that provides marketing strategy and organizational services to many leading high-technology companies as well as to those in other sectors. Moore is also a Venture Partner with Mohr, Davidow Ventures, a California-based venture capital firm specializing in specific technology markets, including e-commerce, internet, enterprise software, networking and semiconductors. In this latter role, as a venture partner at a leading “VC” firm, he provides market strategy advice to their high-tech portfolio companies.

Mr. Moore’s most recent book, Living on the Fault Line was published in a revised edition in the summer of 2002. This edition focuses on managing for shareholder value in any economy including the current “age of anxiety.” In line with this focus, Moore’s current practice is focused around the Fault Line methodology and his specialty is presenting and analyzing the core versus context model described in chapter two – core being anything that contributes directly to competitive differentiation and leads to customer preference in purchase decisions. Context is everything else – all the things that you or your company or product must do to pass muster but which do not differentiate you from others in the same market. Likewise, the key lesson for investors is that the New Economy, with the help of the Internet, enables companies as never before to outsource their context in order to focus on their core enterprises.

Moore has written three other books. Perhaps most notably, he is the author of Crossing the Chasm, one of the most influential business books of the twentieth century, in which he introduces readers to a gap or “chasm” which innovative companies and their products must cross in order to reach the lucrative mainstream market. As a follow-up, Moore’s second book, Inside the Tornado, provides readers with insight into how to capitalize on the potential for hypergrowth beyond the chasm, detailing the need for radical shifts in market strategy and prescribing appropriate tactics for succeeding in each stage of the cycle. The Gorilla Game is Moore’s third book, which he co-authored with The Chasm Group managing partner and high-tech marketing strategist Tom Kippola, and stock investment guru and BancAmerica Robertson Stephens analyst Paul Johnson. It offers readers a coherent approach to high-tech investing and understanding of how to build a solid investment strategy around purchasing and holding stocks of what authors call “gorilla” companies.

Prior to founding The Chasm Group in 1992 and TCG Advisors in 2003, Moore was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high-tech marketing strategy and marketing communications company. For the decade prior, he was a sales and marketing executive at three different software companies.

Mr. Moore holds an undergraduate degree in literature from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He also served as an English professor at Olivet College.

Publications

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.