Combining lessons learned from Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, and The Gorilla Game, Living on the Fault Line offers a playbook for managing for shareholder (and stakeholder) value in an era of disruption and digital transformation.
The fault line is that dangerous, unstable seam in the economy where digital transformation, artificial
intelligence, and other powerful innovations meet and create market-shattering tremors. Every company lives on it; no manager can control it; everyone must learn to deal with it. Specifically, how can companies that rose to prominence in a prior era maintain that prominence in the new one?
Living on the Fault Line is a prescriptive guide for navigating the dynamics of shareholder valuation. It
focuses on maintaining the right balance between performance and power, the former being driven by the numbers in the quarterly earnings report, the latter by the narrative that accompanies them. The challenge is that modern business practice has over-rotated to the performance numbers and paid insufficient attention to the power narrative. To build a more powerful power narrative and then execute it, management must discriminate between what is core to their business success (efforts that create
sustainable competitive differentiation) and what is context (all the other obligations their industry entails), and then use power metrics to prioritize resource allocation to extract resources from the latter in order to amplify the former.