The Chasm Companion – Paul Wiefels

In The Chasm Companion, The Chasm Group’s Paul Wiefels presents readers with a new analysis of the ideas introduced in bestselling author Geoffrey Moore’s classic books, Crossing the Chasm andInside the Tornado, and focuses on how to translate these ideas into actionable strategy and implementation programs. This step-by-step fieldbook is organized around three major concepts: how high-tech markets develop, creating market development strategy, and executing go-to-market programs based on the strategy.

AMAZON.COM REVIEW

Fans of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado will certainly be attracted to The Chasm Companion, a step-by-step manual by longtime Moore associate Paul Wiefels that lays out specific ways to apply his popular tech-oriented business principles in our fast-changing world. But even those who never warmed to the earlier works–which proposed a pragmatic path for successfully navigating the ever-moving environment of “disruptive technologies that force changes in both strategy and behavior”–could find this book appealing. Designing The Chasm Companion as a hands-on field guide, Wiefels opens by explaining six “inflection points” in high-tech market development (the Early Market, the Chasm, the Bowling Alley, the Tornado, Main Street, Total Assimilation) that he and Moore insist everyone must carefully watch and properly react to as internal and external conditions evolve. He then outlines models and tools developed in the consulting practice he co-founded with Moore that enable individual corporations to carefully craft relevant strategies that they can align correctly with the appropriate market phases defined earlier. Finally, he presents initiatives (strategy validation, whole product management, marketing communications planning, and field engagement strategy) to help these firms actually implement their plans. Graphics and sidebars help Wiefels drive his points home clearly. –Howard Rothman

FROM BOOKLIST

Wiefels and partner Geoffrey Moore are cofounders of the Chasm Group, a Silicon Valley high-tech consulting firm. This is a guide to understanding and implementing the market-development strategies described in Moore’s best-sellers Inside the Tornado (1995) and Crossing the Chasm (1999). The partners have developed a model called the technology adoption life cycle (TALC), which describes how communities of people adopt innovations and integrate them into mainstream life. The chasm phase is a product-development black hole, a period of time in which products that show promise are ignored by the public at large. Other stages described on the path to total assimilation by the culture are the bowling alley, the tornado, and Main Street. The book offers real-life management formulas for guiding high-tech innovations through these treacherous phases of development. Wiefels’ experience in the field gives readers an edge in anticipating the pitfalls unique to each phase. His introduction to the TALC is clear and informative; the descriptions of market-development strategies are exhaustive and detailed. David Siegfried
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