Interviewing Geoffrey Moore: Great Business Books

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This article is Part 1 of an 8 part series.

Geoffrey Moore is a best selling author, with successful books such as Dealing with Darwin, Crossing the Chasm, and Inside the Tornado to name a few.  Geoffrey Moore is a sought after source for effective business practices.  I never get tired of reading his work.  I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the amazing Geoffrey Moore.  Below is the beginning of the interview, where I ask this successful author what business books he finds exemplary. 

Curt-You're among a handful of business authors who are seeking and finding new laws of the world and the economic universe.

Geoffrey-We're trying!

Curt-Others in this category are Clayton Christensen, Michael Porter, Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming and maybe even Adam Smith.

Geoffrey-Wow, that's pretty heavy company!

Curt-Well, I'm impressed.  I've read many, many books and a lot of them are simply fluff.  I have a book out myself.  What business books are you finding right now, if any, that are of the same caliber?  I read one of your Harvard Business Review articles (from around 2007) that was about innovation in the mid-term, the short-term, and the long term.

Geoffrey-Yes, the planning books.  The truth is, in the last decade, business books kind of went in the tank when the tech downturn happened.  There were actually quite a lot of interesting business books in the 90's covering subjects such as the value of discipline, product leadership and operational excellence.  Emerging from this decade was a great author named Adrian Slywotzky.  For whatever reason, his books didn't catch on as much as I thought they would.  He wrote a book called Value Migration and another called The Profit Zones. These were about how profit pools accumulate in markets, how different strategies can tap into different profit pools and how the role in the value chain gains or loses power over time. 

Another good business book is by author Mehrdad Baghai. It's called The Granularity of Growth.  Baghai argues that even in the most mature, single-digit growth markets, there are still pockets of double-digit growth -- they're just granular in nature.  As soon as you start averaging them across large numbers, all of these double digits disappear.  They are like little grapes rather than watermelons.  Any company can use The Granularity of Growth model to find the groups that are experiencing high growth in a particular issue.  It doesn't have to be a huge group for it to generate one to two million dollars' worth of business.  And if companies can find a pocket of interest where their product is the perfect fit, then companies can differentiate themselves from competitors.  Find the granularities of growth in your reachable geography.  

If you are a global business, then you can reach the crowd as long as your company is accessible through the web.  Once you find your target audience, you can do what we call ‘whole product plus one'.  Every company has to figure out what they do that is the one little piece for one little industry.  You want your pocket of interest to say, 'Wow!  We can't get that from anybody else and that's cool.  It may not be cool to anybody else, but it's cool to us.'  Thus, your product becomes the perfect fit.

This is only the beginning of this informative and exciting interview.  For the next couple of weeks, I'll be passing on what I learned from Geoffrey Moore, so stay tuned!  Read part 2 here.

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx.  You can purchase his book on Amazon.

Curt Finch has more than two decades of software development and distributed workforce management experience. In 1997, Curt created the world's first internet-based timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product offering. Curt has a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. His book, All Your Money, is available on Amazon. @curtfinch