Geoffrey Moore

Why Geoffrey is the canonical Strategy Consultant

Geoffrey Moore arrived at technology strategy through an unlikely route: a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington and years teaching at Olivet College in Michigan. After moving to California and transitioning into corporate training and sales roles at a succession of tech firms, he joined the McKenna Group — the consulting practice of marketing pioneer Regis McKenna — where he encountered the recurring puzzle that would define his career. Why do so many disruptive technologies stall at the same moment, after winning enthusiastic early adopters but before reaching the mainstream market? His 1991 answer, *Crossing the Chasm*, named that gap and gave a generation of technology companies a navigable map through it. The Technology Adoption Life Cycle — Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards — had existed as a theoretical construct; Moore transformed it into a decision framework for go-to-market strategy, arguing that the chasm between Early Adopters and the Early Majority is not a smooth transition but a structural discontinuity requiring an entirely different product, sales motion, and market-entry logic.

What makes Moore the archetype of the Strategy Consultant is not just that he wrote a durable framework — it is how he deployed it. He built the Chasm Group as a vehicle for applying that framework directly to C-suite decisions, and took on venture-partner roles at firms including Mohr Davidow Ventures and Wildcat Venture Partners, where strategic advice and capital allocation reinforce each other. He extended the body of work through *Inside the Tornado*, *Escape Velocity*, and *Zone to Win*, each book diagnosing a different phase of the technology adoption curve and translating it into boardroom-ready vocabulary. The core of the strategy consultant role — selling an idea rather than its implementation, earning authority through a named, proprietary methodology, and opening client doors that no individual's reputation alone could open — describes Moore's practice precisely.

In the Early Computing hype cycle, when the personal computer was crossing from enthusiast hobbyists into corporate IT departments and mass-market consumers, Moore supplied the strategic grammar for that crossing. His framework became standard doctrine not because it was academically novel but because it was operationally useful: it told a founder or CMO exactly which customer segment to focus on, which adjacent segments to temporarily ignore, and how to sequence a market-entry campaign to build momentum rather than dissipate it. Thirty years on, *Crossing the Chasm* is still assigned in MBA programs and referenced in Series A pitch decks — evidence that the underlying insight about adoption discontinuity outlasts the specific technologies it was first used to explain.

The Strategy Consultant sells ideas — frameworks, analyses, board-level recommendations under a firm's brand. See the Strategy Consultant role →

Same role, different wave