In the course of his February 8 session, Geoffrey Moore let drop that he was an English major, and even taught English for a while. Perhaps that explains why, beyond his penetrating analysis of pitfalls in the new economy, he is so good at creating metaphors that stick in the mind:

The Fault Line - connoting not just the seismic geography of Silicon Valley, but the dangerous, quick moving milieu in which we all must do business.

The Gorilla - e.g., the 800 pound gorilla that can sit anywhere he wants; the mega-players in their industries (Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, AOL).

The Escalator - while we designate out latest and most important processes as "core," time is already turning them into "context" - it's like trying to run up a down escalator.

The Bowling Alley - the moment in market rollout when it is necessary to hit a few head pins (pragmatist customers) and build market share.

The Tornado - the moment when all hell breaks loose, and everyone wants what you have to sell.

And then there is the most engaging metaphor of all, The Chasm. It has always been there - an enormous yawning canyon spreading as far as the eye can see, separating the dreams of organizations from the fulfillment of those dreams. The Chasm is what an idea must leap across to find a market. It is where business dreams most often die.

Moore began by separating all business processes into those that are core (that enhance competitiveness) and context (everything else). The first challenge we face is ensuring that we spent as much of our scarce resources on core as possible, and as little on context.

In a faultline economy, he said, nothing lasts for very long. Today's core has a way of becoming tomorrow's context, as in his example of going up a down escalator. "The old economy's core, Moore said, "is the new economy's context."

One organization's core can easily be another's context, he pointed out. Memory is core to pragmatist customers, but to Compaq it's just commodity.

But generally speaking, core work attracts youth, energy, and ambition, while context work attracts that part of us that just wants to do our job.

And by scarce resources, Moore doesn't mean money. Capital, off-the-shelf software to perform context chores, and outside vendors to do things for you, exist in abundance. The greatest scarcity in the faultline economy is time. Followed by talent and management attention span (which is really another aspect of time).

In the faultline economy, the old verities have given way to things that are faster, cheaper, and easier to move. Atoms have given way to bits, assets to information, virtual integration to virtual integration, money to time, and earnings to market cap. In the old economy we gave up time for money (we called it "work.") In the faultline economy, that equation is reversed.

Bottom line: to survive the seismic changes around us, we need to outsource our context, which is little more than organizational hygiene. And insource our core, that which distinguishes us and makes us special.

Moore even had a good word for downsizing. While much is made of large companies getting smaller and small companies getting larger, that does not reflect badly on large companies. They aren't really getting smaller, they're virtualizing -- outsourcing context chores.

What we mustn't do is congratulate ourselves that we are on top of the the faultline when we are actually being ground up within it. Merely having a website does not put a company on the map; most dry cleaners have websites. The core is always on the move. Today's state of the art includes business-to-business processes like Web-based EDI-type procurement and online auction-houses. It won't, tomorrow.

Moore said there are really three important causes fought along the faultline. The first is the fight of emerging value chains against existing value chains for the right to exist. The status quo does not want disruptive challengers crossing the chasm into the promised land of market share. The chasm is crossed by newcomers at great cost to both the newcomer and the oldtimer, because the life of each is at stake.

The second is the fight within each value chain to see which player has the ultimate power. Whoever seizes this power -- usually the company that crosses the chasm first -- becomes the big gorilla. The big gorilla gets to call the shots in that industry, setting standards and calling market cap to itself like a magnet.

The third is the scramble between value chain members to see who will dominate market share. Moore has a two-tier taxonomy of market dominance.

The first is gorilla-based. The gorilla calls the shots because it is a gorilla (e.g., Intel). The chimp is an imitation gorilla, serving niche markets (Motorola). And the monkey is the low-baller, competing against the gorilla on price (AMD).

The second tier (king, prince, serf) is like the gorilla hierarchy, only this tier features non-proprietary products and services. The king dominates, but it less ferocious than the gorilla. The prince is positioned to topple the king from his throne. The serf is the x-factor at the bottom of the hierarchy, crazy enough to do anything to break into the game.

Product Leadership: you clobber competitors by being firstest to market with the mostest and best (H-P printers).

Operational Excellence: you win by achieving insuperable efficiencies in production and delivery (McDonalds).

Customer Intimacy: you create a second-to-none customer experience (Lexus).

To Treacy's three disciples, Moore added a fourth, the notion of Discontinuous Innovation. This is the "disruptive technology that Clayton Christensen discussed (also in 1999), the weasel technologies that arise out of nowhere (Toyota, IBM PC, Schwab) to devour the markets of gorillas and kings, one segment at a time.

Moore showed us a bell curve of the technology adoption life cycle. It's a very good chart because it not only shows what the market segments are for most differentiated offerings, but it illustrates the very different challenges companies face as they approach each segment -- the chasm, the bowling alley, the tornado and so on.

He described five categories of buyers, five markets:

The first are the innovators. These are the techies who, God bless 'em, shell out cash for untested new technologies, and keep the flame of hope kindled. They do it out of love for the new.

The second are the early adapters. They are the canny users who can see the advantages of upstart technologies, and seize them before the mainstream. They do it out of visionary self-interest.

Next comes the two pragmatist groups: the early majority, who mover to a new technology because that is the way the wind seems to be blowing, and the late majority, who see the writing on the wall and align themselves accordingly.

Beyond that is a kind of secondary chasm, the laggards and technophobes who will buy in only when there is no other alternative.

All five responses are legitimate, but the pragmatists, the majority in the middle where the bell curve swells, decide who succeeds and who fails.

In a perfect universe, a product rolls out the left side, catches on with a few early adapters, then continues rolling, bowling alley-style, until it knocks down key market segments. At that point a mass market accepts it, and a tornado of buying and selling is underway. As the product matures, it reaches the main street stage, a cash cow that sells itself, until demand tapers off, and the curve shortens again.

But there is a catch. There is one place on this curve where business plans crash and burn precipitously. It is the space between the early market and the majority market -- the expanse of wilderness Moore calls the chasm. It is the uneven space the bowling ball must traverse before it strikes the first pin -- and gutter balls are commonplace.

In the early market phase, the focuses will be discontinuous innovation (a whole new thing) and product leadership (winning favor of early adapters).

In the bowling alley phase, the focuses will be product leadership and customer intimacy (niche targeting).

In the tornado phase, the focuses are operational excellence (meeting sudden customer demand) and product leadership. The gorilla with the best brand and the most features wins every time. Moore echoed Henry Ford's saying, during Ford Motor's great tornado period, "You can have a car any color you like, so long as it's black." The tornado twists too violently to hold customers' hands.

If you are lucky enough to make it to the main street, cash-cow phase, your focus will likely be on customer intimacy (making that conservative customer feel comfortable buying your product) and operational excellence (being so efficient you can wring profit from a maturing product).

What was fascinating, however, was that all four functions got along pretty well in three stages, but only one function (professional services) had anything good to say about the bowling alley. Each function, for one reason or another, lost heart at this crucial juncture. R&D felt matters were out of its hand then. Operations did it, but grudgingly. For sales, the bowling alley is a quota killer. Finance? Forget about finance.

1. Get the board focused on the real challenge. Boards often misunderstand product failure, blaming it on poor R&D. Poor R&D is seldom the reason the chasm swallows you up. Have the board target the first headpins, and define metrics for success.
2. Construct a dedicated chasm-crossing team. You need a senior executive to champion the transition. This person runs interference for the project, and has martial law powers to make chasm-crossing priority one. Other teams members should include the industry marketing manager, the target segment sales manager, the whole product manager, the value chain manager, the professional services manager, and liaisons to R&D, operations, and finance.

3. Deconstruct lingering resistance. This is where Dilbertiana tends to blossom. Stomp out those cynical beauties before the bud. "Get with the program, or get out of the way."
4. Don't stop with the first pin. An isolated pin the pragmatist community is meaningless. After you tackle that first customer, get up, dust yourself off, and go after another.