Geoffrey Moore, the insightful author of Crossing the Chasm, discusses a new vocabulary for power in this podcast as part of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar from Stanford. Power in this context is the ability to lead and innovate toward future growth and opportunities.

Geoffrey Moore is that special kind of author that you feel intuitively is on to something profound, which you must spend some effort to fully grasp; like this perl of wisdom:

    "Power fuels performance, and performance consumes power."

In this talk he offers practical ways to approach the problem of shifting resources to support longer term commercial developpment. He frames the discussion in his Hierarchy of powers which describes an organizations' position and strength in relation each of these five levels:

• Category power
• Company power
• Market power
• Offer power
• Execution power

The part of the discussion which most caught my attention was this discussion about Offer power, and how this kind of investment comes down to three types of efforts which operate at the Product Manager level:

• Differentiate: distinguishing from competitors
• Neutralize: catch up to the competition
• Optimize: extract resources to use elsewhere

Moore states, that these goals are not mutualy compatible, and cannot be fulfilled by a single team, or a single mandate. I think I get that!

Moore is a great speaker, so I encourage you to listen to the talk. The talk cover parts of his upcoming book: Escape Velocity which is due out in september.