Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past

This is a classic business strategy book by the author of “Crossing the Chasm.” It’s not really practical advice – the author concedes that it’s a “framework of frameworks” that help you think about your company’s future.

More specifically, he talks about “power” in several domains:

• Category Power: The relative demand for the category of product you offer.

• Company Power: The relative power your company has relative to its competitors.

• Market Power: The relative power your company has relative to a specific market segment.

• Offer Power: The relative power of a specific offer/product over its competitors.

• Execution Power: How well your company can execute on a defined problem, relative to other companies.

Each one of the above gets its own chapter, complete with mental models for analyzing it, and suggestions for improving it.

Again, this is a general strategy book. It might expand your thinking a bit, but there isn’t a lot of practical advice here.

The author is famous for “Crossing the Chasm,” which has become a business classic. I don’t know if this book quite lives up to that one, but that would be a tall order for any book.