Inside the Torpedo

Inside the Torpedo

Geoffrey A. Moore has become a legend in the modern business era. He is kind of an oracle and pied-piper rolled into one clairvoyant visionary. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have seen Geoffrey Moore’s work either quoted, referenced, or bastardized by mid-level managers and big corporate executives alike. His two primary gospels are “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado”. I have read both of these books. They were interesting, insightful, and not too long with reasonably large print. I enjoyed reading both of these books. I have not, however, enjoyed living my management’s interpretations of these books. The problem with Moore’s work is that every two-bit manager who reads either of these books suddenly becomes the next Jack Welsh and is determined to live the dream, or inflict the nightmare depending on which side of desk you are sitting. So in response to any manager, strategist, or executive who has tried to implement Geoffrey Moore’s ideas into the real world where people actually have to accomplish things rather than just philosophize about them, I would like submit my rebuttal to Mr. Moore. I affectionately call this “Inside the Torpedo”. Before reading further, consider fully exactly what it would be like to be inside Torpedo….consider the feeling of being inside the torpedo as it travels to its destination….consider the end game of the torpedo. One of Geoffrey Moore’s most startling lessons is that “as markets move from stage to stage in the Life Cycle, the winning strategy does not change, it actually reverses the prior strategy. The very skills that you’ve just perfected become your liabilities and if you can’t put them aside to acquire new ones you are in for tough times”. “Tough times! Holy cow!” says the manager. There are two key points that I need to make here 1) most managers in business are over grown children who never got their way growing up. This is why they are managers. They can make a living telling other people what to do. 2) Two of the great lessons from every parent to every child are - never play with a gun and always treat every gun as if it were loaded so you don’t shoot anyone. Now think again about what Geoffrey A. Moore has just said in conjunction with those two very important lessons. Mr. Moore has just given a fully loaded .357 magnum to every over grown child on the planet along with a shot of whisky and pack of smokes. Your assets will become you liabilities. I think that may be true over time. However that statement, turned into strategy at the incompetent manager level turns into ideas like “we need to rearrange the deck chairs” (incompetent managers for some reason love to talk about deck chairs – I think it is so we will all think that they own boats – but we all know that only cruise ships have deck chairs so we really know that rather than owning a really cool sail boat he or she just got back from a Disney cruise and probably tripped over the deck chairs on the way to the buffet. I guess that’s why they need rearranging.) Do you know what rearranging the deck chairs means to the manager with a loaded gun? It means doing things like breaking all the long established, trusted, and invaluable relationships we have with our clients and putting snot-nosed MBA’s from Wharton in as new team leads. This is part of being inside the torpedo. I know my fate when this happens, I know the outcome when we make the people who pay our bills mad. I am inside the torpedo and there is nothing I can do to change my fate. If this type of action weren’t bad enough, newly empowered Jack Welsh wannabes then try to modify and interpret Moore’s ideas. Therefore, if over time our assets will become our liabilities….the over grown child concludes….it also must also be true that our liabilities will over the long run, become our assets. When managers who are disciples of Geoffrey Moore start extrapolating their own conclusions from Mr. Moore’s books, this is what I like to call “firing the torpedo”. This usually results in someone getting fired, like us by our best client, who we just turned into a liability. This of course over the long term does become an asset, but the new Jack Welsh didn’t realize that our new liability over the long term has become an asset not for us but our competitors. Geoffrey A. Moore’s work, in the hands of trained professionals, of managers who are not over grown children, who know how and when to fire a gun, is probably thought provoking and energizing in setting a corporate vision over time. If Geoffrey A. Moore really wanted to help the masses in business today, he would have a quiz that people would have to pass before they could buy his books. If he would follow this simple advice, he could keep his asset from turning into a liability and he could save us all a lot of torpedo rides.