Rating: 
Summary: Solid Study of Those Growing Market Share and Stock Price
Review: Dr. Fred Wiersema (of The Discipline of Market Leaders) returns with a look at how the disciplines of becoming a market leader have evolved since the earlier book was written. This book is much better done in terms of analysis than the prior one, and comes closer to capturing the state of the art. Basically, Dr. Wiersema argues that the most effective companies are now gaining customers by employing more than one of the original disciplines (customer relationships, having cutting-edge innovative offerings, and being operationally superb). The book's main weakness is that by selecting companies based on a high market capitalization/sales ratio the book strays from a focus on finding companies that are the best at adding customers and making money serving them. As a result, some pretty marginal companies made it into the study group (Priceline is one example). The companies in the study are compared to the Fortune Most Admired List. The companies outlined here are much more consistently interesting than the aging behemoths losing market share that the Most Admired list carries. Looking at 5009 companies, 640 were identified as being high in gaining market share (growing much faster than competitors) and in stock price (having a higher market capitalization/sales ratio than competitors). The top names you will recognize: Cisco, GE, Microsoft, Intel, Yahoo!, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Oracle, Nokia, and AOL Time Warner. If you follow technology stocks, most of the rest will also be known to you. These include companies whose stocks have fallen mightily like JDS Uniphase, Dell, QUALCOMM, Hewlett Packard, Lucent, PMC-Sierra, and At Home. The book makes many observations about the new economy. The basic point is that technology has permitted such substantial productivity gains that there is a lot of excess capacity with low costs. As a result, what companies have to manage is getting customers. Those are the scarce resource. Well, I always thought that you had to start with customers. Peter Drucker once said that the purpose of a business is to create a customer. What does seem different now is that people go to greater lengths to add customers. Dr. Wiersema says that new aspects include: (1) creating a larger-than-life market presence; (2) seeking out customers who stretch capabilities; (3) ensuring that the customer obtains full benefit from your offerings; and (4) acting more boldly (this often means having outsized ambitions). Obviously, the drawback of this approach is that if the business environment turns out differently than you forecast (the norm, not the exception) you are likely to crash and burn. How do you feel about that? Customers are then segmented by the degree of their preference for being self-reliant versus ready for help, and their eagerness to change versus their preference for stability. These scales turn into the searchers (self-reliant, eager to change), collaborators (ready for help, eager to change), streamliners (self-reliant, seeking stability), and the delegators (seeking stability and ready for help). You are encouraged to keep enticing the searchers (Yahoo! is the case study); reassure the streamliners (EMC is the case study); free up the delegators (Solectron is the case study); and team up with collaborators (UPS is the case study). I found the case studies to be pretty superficial compared to what I know about these companies. The book also has a good discussion of what kind of internal environment is needed to act boldly and with enough unity of purpose to succeed. You need a process for facilitating change, an agreement on shared ambitions, clear goals, and knowledge of where you stand. Your mantra should be "customers, customers, customers." The book's main weaknesses relate to not considering enough about how to gain market share profitably (any idiot can gain market share if they don't care what it costs, and have enough resources), what the emerging state of the art is (the examples here are slightly out-of-date and incomplete), and an overfocus on the customer-facing dimension of gaining customers. That last point probably sounds strange. More innovation in getting customers comes today in creating new business models for serving customers than in marketing, sales activities, or new technologies. This book missed that point. Compared to the recent raft of quantitative studies published by Harvard Business School Press, this is by far the best of the lot despite its weaknesses. Read this book, and you will benefit by focusing on more relevant role models and understanding more about how you have to reshape yourself to compete for market share gains. May your profit and personal growth always exceed your boldest dreams!
Rating: 
Summary: Strategic Input for Senior Executives
Review: Dr. Wiersema's book is valuable information for those looking to better understand how to frame up their position within an increasingly competitive market. Fred's process provides useful measurement options to consider when plotting a path towards market leadership. A great follow-on to his previous "The Discipline of Market Leaders."
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Summary: Market Leadership Principles More Timely Than Ever
Review: Dr. Wiersema's perspectives on responses to customer scarcity are right on target with current market conditions. You have only to look at the telecom market today to see what happens when customers can't keep up with the abundance of products and services that keep flooding the market. It will be fascinating to watch the sales-growth index for the companies in my portfolio to make sure they maintaining their pace in growing faster than their peers. Highly recommended for other senior executives looking for a fresh point-of-view on customers that goes beyond the obvious and for investors seeking new metrics for analyzing company performance.
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Summary: Great Ideas For Innovation
Review: Great Book. This book gives a wonderful perspective on why the market is so competitive. The ideas around "stretch customers" give a practical guide on how to fuel innovation at your own company. There are also several case studies to use as examples. It's a good, quick read.
Rating:
Summary: Great Ideas For Innovation
Review: Great Book. This book gives a wonderful perspective on why the market is so competitive. The ideas around "stretch customers" give a practical guide on how to fuel innovation at your own company. There are also several case studies to use as examples. It's a good, quick read.
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Summary: His Latest is the Greatest
Review: I just finished Wiersema's latest and found it both entertaining and useful. The very personal and revealing stories about the companies are the entertaining part. The author is clearly not an academic type - his information comes from his experiences working with some of the top companies in the world. The most useful part is the new ranking system. I was surprised - and pleased - to see how well his rankings held up post bubble, and found the comparison chart (Apepndix II) fascinating. To me this indicates that Wiersema's method is a good measure of intrinsic value, as opposed to market mania. I think he's on solid ground with this, and we could all use a little solid ground right now.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a lot of meat
Review: I loved Discipline of Market Leaders. As a business owner I read and listen to a lot of books and Discipline of Market leaders was great. Unfortunately this follow up book by only one of the authors didn't have much to offer. Lots and lots of words but not much being said. There are a few nuggets of knowledge, as there are with most books, but unlike the Discipline of Market leaders that I went through 3 times and even took notes while going through it, this new book was just short of a waste of time. Wish I could say it was better...
Rating: 
Summary: Sorry, more than storytelling
Review: I was a bit too quick to jump into a conclusion before reading the whole book. So please ignore my previous rating but take into account the points I made. The second part of the book was much better. It contains this important categorization: purchasing behaviour of customers. Wiersema divides the customers into four broad groups and tries to fit in each grouping the strategies employed by the market leaders defined in the list.
However, even though novel, I was not very comfortable with that classification. I personally consider that there are more than four broad categories regarding purchasing behaviour. This is actually what microsegmentation is about. So, instead of trying to force your strategies into those four categories, one should try to identify many many more behavioral patterns with respect to her own customers. So, instead of emulating the strategies of the market leaders and forcing your customers to fit in any one of those categories, maybe you should better to microsegment them and try to figure out as many distinct purchasing behaviours as possible, and only then maybe use the insights given in the book. In other words, the insights that Mr Wiersema provides us with are good, but regarding strategising, the model he offers is not useful and actually very restrictive. Also, if you read other books which describe the strategies of the same companies there, e.g. Charles Schwab, ... etc., you will end up finding other explantions regarding their strategies. I believe, truly understanding your customer and distinguishing among them similar purchasing behavior and strageizing on top of this are they keys to success. This second review, however, does not refute my earlier point that the book is not based on an in-depth study of 5000 companies at all. Hence, the claim is still not true. Of these 5000, there are only a number of companies on which superficial evidence is given. Additionally, on four of them, there are detailed case studies, but that's all. Hence, I would still not reccommend it to a serious strategy reader but I would also not be so rude to downgrade the good effort the author has put into the study. Again, sorry about the first rating.
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Summary: Great leadership guide for today's economic times
Review: In a turbulent economic time when everyone is seeking answers to questions about the future and which companies are going to survive and thrive, Wiersema's book provides an excellent foundation for formulating predictions. It may not be a huge surprise to find out who the New Market Leaders are. But it is interesting to learn about their personal stories, how some of the underdogs made their way to the top, while once sure bets slid toward the bottom. Senior executives and alike will find this material useful in striving to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Fred's theories of achieving market leadership in turbulent times of "customer scarcity" may be one of the most significant challenges facing business leaders today. I'm not sure many would argue that an intense focus on customers and the right technology strategy drive market leadership - but unlike most industry visionaries, Fred backs this up with hard data on the 5,000 companies he tracked.
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Summary: So far it is just story telling
Review: Maybe this is a rush to review this book as I have 100 more pages to read. But what came so far, I believe, is a good indicator of what is to come. I will refine my review later. I believe the book is a "misleader". It is not an "in-depth" study of 5000 or so firms. This is simply not true. What it does is providing an alternative way of ranking those companies. OK., the new method may be acceptable. But what one expects to find out after the classification is a solid and robust study of these firms based on an acceptable methodology, be it a questionnaire, in-repth interviews, statistical analysis etc. What you get, however, is just circumstantial description of what Mr Wiersema "thinks" the reasons of their market leadership are. But this is not nice. I feel myself fooled as I was expecting really an in-depth analysis whereas I found just storytelling. You should hence approach the book with a lot of care. It consists of two parts. Part one is the categorization of the market leaders w.r.to an alternative methodology. In part two, those companies just disappear, excepting some lip service and one or two cases. That's it. What exists is what Mr Wiersema believes that they do. If this the case, why advertise your book as "based on 5,000 companies". This is simply fooling people and may even be considered misleading advertisement. Also, the last part of the book where he categorises the customer on the basis of their purchasing behaviour, I will tend not to buy his views. Because CRM (Customer Relationship Management) helps you do this in a much refined and industry-specific way. Nobody needs such broad categorisations when finer categorisations are tehoretically and technically possible (CRM) and also when these classifications are NOT based on a solid study of the market leaders even though the author argues that they are. I personally couldn't find anything intereseting, let alone scientific, in this book. It is just about STATING THE OBVIOUS while fooling the reader that it is something else and something really scientific.
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