Optimization - Seth Godin & Geoffrey Moore

Seth Godin in a recent post advises against spending time on optimizing something that is doing well enough. Rather it is better, after a certain stage to spend time on creation.

Good advice for individuals. And for businesses too. I recommend one should read Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution for a clearer - and longer - exposition.

Geoffrey Moore defines the state of a company along two axes - Core, and Context. Core represents activities/products that provide differentiation from the competition. Context is everything else that a business does to stay in the game. .

A product progresses from being high-Core + low-Context, to high-Core + high-Context, to low-Core + high-Context, and finally to low-Core + low-Context.

It is in the later two states that optimization - including outsourcing - come into play. It is also during the third stage that it becomes important, to use Geoffrey's words, to "extract from Context and allocate to Core".

I think Seth's advice fits in with "extract from Context and allocate to Core". And that optimization can only take the business so far.

Here is a  a video of Geoffrey Moore explaining these concepts to an audience of software developers.