Zone to Win

The productivity zone is home to a host of enabling investments in shared services, all managed as cost centers. These include marketing, central engineering, technical support, manufacturing, supply chain, customer service, human resources, IT, legal, finance, and administration. Simply put, any function in the corporation that does not have direc

On the row side, the challenge for GM Scott McCorkle is to creatively apply the four zones model inside his Marketing Cloud while fulfilling its external commitments to the performance zone. To do so, he must integrate and optimize social media assets that were developed on independent architectures (productivity zone), leverage his core email mark

Incomplete alignment at the executive level. In this scenario one or more senior executives simply choose not to suit up, preferring instead to direct their energies toward efforts more specific to their own interests.

1. Neutralize. 2. Optimize. 3. Differentiate.

In markets where you want to be the disruptor, where you want to play offense, you must catch the next wave. At the same time, in those markets where your current franchise is the incumbent and is itself under a disruptive attack, you have to play defense in order to prevent the next wave from catching you.

The first principle of zone defense is that you must never attempt to disrupt yourself. As an established enterprise, your number-one asset is the inertial momentum of your installed customer base. Your number-two asset is an ecosystem of partners that makes its living adding value to your established offerings.

The first is to help management teams in established franchises manage the resource allocation challenges of onboarding a new line of business while maintaining commitments to the existing ones. This we call playing zone offense.

The CEO’s second task is to sponsor a dramatic reallocation of resources, one that will put everyone’s nose out of joint.

In sum, the incubation zone represents precious real estate that should not be confused with experimentation with next-generation technologies and business models. That sort of thing can be done in a Skunk Works or a lab, a domain where learning is the prime objective and fast failure is actually a form of success.