"I don't want to have a minnow next to a minotaur because the minnow is never going to feature in the conversation" - Mark Richards

This is the first episode where we deep-dive into strategy. Whether your portfolio is shaping a strategy or deploying one shaped elsewhere, you need tools to contextualize it in the overall enterprise. We take horizon-based investment and Geoffrey Moore's Zone to Win model and explore what happens when you use it as a conceptual model for your portfolio ecosystem.

Along the way, we discuss our belief that you should be able to take an overall enterprise strategy and model your portfolios as logical pieces of it. Each should have a clear purpose and context, and collectively they should add back up to the whole. Our conversation explores the implications of each of Moore's four zones and the insights and implications that emerge when you leverage them to characterize your portfolios.

In this episode, we cover:

• (00:39) Episode Intro
• (3:00) Why partition your strategy?
• (7:01) What is horizon-based investment?
• (14:38) How does Geoffrey Moore's Zone to Win model help us understand portfolios?
• (24:56) What is the Performance Zone and how does it apply to portfolios?
• (38:31) What types of portfolios live in the Productivity Zone, and what are the strategy implications?
• (49:04) What is the difference between general "innovation investment" and the Incubation Zone?
• (55:41) When does the Transformation Zone come to life, and what kind of strategies play out there?
• (1:05:02) Wrap

Cast:

Eric Willeke

Mark Richards

Show Notes

Book References:

• Your strategy needs a strategy – Reeves, Haanaes, Sinha
• Zone to Win – Geoffrey Moore