Written in conjunction with Marc Benioff’s team at Salesforce and Satya Nadella’s team at Microsoft, Zone to Win gives executive teams in established enterprises an organizational playbook for how best to address the conflicting demands for performance, productivity, incubation, and transformation all within a single annual plan.
Zone To Win introduces four zones of activity that together make up the totality of an enterprise’s value-
creating work, each requiring its own operating model, its own metrics, and its own best practices in order for it, and the enterprise as a whole, to succeed.
The chapter on the Performance Zone introduces the performance matrix and how it supports a “win or learn” approach to competitive markets.
The chapter on the Productivity Zone shines a light on two very different kinds of operating models, one in systems that maintain the status quo and increase efficiency, the other in programs that change the status quo to increase effectiveness.
The chapter on the Incubation Zone adapts the operating model (but not the financial model) of the venture capital industry to fund and nurture trial balloons involving disruptive innovations, freeing them from the operating metrics of both the Performance and the Productivity Zones, while holding them strictly to VC milestone funding criteria.
The chapter on the Transformation Zone offers playbooks to address two very different situations, one where your team is the disruptor and needs to create maximum competitive separation as fast as possible, regardless of impact on the current quarterly earnings, and other where you are the disruptee and need to catch up as fast as possible in order to retain the confidence of you customer base, ecosystem partners, and investors.