Rating: 
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: Authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema make it clear that market leading companies all concentrate on creating value for their customers. Then they focus on specific cases from Nike to Johnson & Johnson. No company, including yours, can succeed by trying to be all things to all people. Companies must ascertain the unique value - be it price, quality or problem solving - they can deliver to a specific market. The book proves that comparisons are not odious if they are interesting, and the comparisons it offers are intriguing indeed. Anecdotes and case histories cover companies that are market leaders today - AT&T, Intel, Airborne Express - and companies that used to be market leaders. The authors offer you three choices: lead with low costs, great products or outstanding ability to solve customers' problems. But if you are going to lead, you have to pick a direction and implement a management strategy that supports it, a lesson eased along by the clarity of the writing. We from getAbstract recommend this book to executives who are seeking advice on trumping their markets.
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Summary: Buy the Harvard Business Review article reprint instead
Review: Excellent content; just not a book's worth. The authors say virtually nothing more than they did in their superb HBR article of the same name a few years back. Another case of a fine 10-page idea gratuitously expanded into a book.
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Summary: Provides extreme focus for business strategists
Review: Excellent strategy framework for planning new product/service introductions. Three value disciplines are described with good examples. Highly relevant as product/service life cycles get shorter and shorter. Great material for providing focus to those with a broken helm.
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Summary: This book will reorganize the way you think about marketing.
Review: For what it does and the way it does it this book deserves a 10. It directly and enjoyably addresses the point it sets out to make, and gets there. The basic point is this, companies that excell in the marketplace deliver on their customer's 'value expectation' with regard to themselves. The authors describe three areas where firms can and do excell in delivering on 'value expectation', operational excellence (best value), customer intimacy (service), and product leadership (innovation). They then describe in detail each of these positions. For each of the three basic positions presented the authors offer real examples of companies using the approach their describing, as well as how they succeed using it. This is the background to the idea of product positioning - instead of a product focus, the idea here is a market sector focus. The emphasis in "Discipline of Market Leaders" is on the customer's expectation for that particular market niche. Then, with sufficient details and examples to make it understandable and applicable, the mind set and process is developed and described. You'll see some familiar and not so familiar names like Wal-Mart, Sony, and Airborne Express used as examples throughout the book. Rather than using these names as an exercise in self-promotion the authors actually make interesting and applicable points through these examples and illustrations. I found the book an eye opening and memorable business read. I probably read between 75-100 business books a year and this is one I've remembered, and I've applied the material repeatedly with success. Most of my collegues agree that in business, time is a precious commodity and wasting it is not suffered gladly. Read this book you'll find the investment worth it.
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Summary: A Must for Every business owner
Review: In Business studies, we were taught that to succeed with our business we should be able to provide best product/service, best prices and superb customer service. The results are mainly unsatisfactory because while we try to master all three aspects, we fail in all of them.This book will teach you for the first time how to succeed with "imperfection" along with customers blessings. You dont have to provide your customer with the best product AND best price AND best service, just choose one of those values (depending on your target market and long term objectives) and focus all your resources on developing this value. The book is backed with real life stories from some of the leading firms and the values they have chosen to focus on. This book is a must for every business owner.
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Summary: A CEO shouldn't be a CEO if he/hasn't read this book
Review: It is intrinsic to people to produce long wish lists. This book proves that reducing these lists and focusing one a few is a key discipline. You get more with less. Rather focus on ONE value rather than 10 etc. Then the authors give reasons why it is necessary to be very focussed.These are 1. Your brand will be recognised if the message is crisp. That means that usually your company can only be remembered for one core value.In the case of this book the authors propose that the choice is between three options, namely: the customer, the product or operations. 2. Competition prevents your company from investing in more than one core value. It is simply too expensive NOT to focus. Related to the latter is the excellent work on "Value Innovaton" by Reneé Mauborgne and Chan Kim. The latter take it one step further and suggest to desinvest in most values and superinvest in one. An example of this strategy is Formula 1 hotels in Europe. Low value in atmosphere, local service, bedroom quality but high value in convenience and hygiene. Excellent value for money. As a marketing consultant, I use this book all the time.
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Summary: Avoid "Stalled" Thinking by Focusing Your Enterprise
Review: Many organizations try to be all things to all people, and end up being mediocre or worse on everything. THE DISCIPLINE OF MARKET LEADERS shows that many organizational stalls can be overcome by focusing the enterprise on being better on cost/prices, innovation that customers value, or relationships. This perspective will be very valuable to 90 percent of all organizations. I hope the authors will go on to publish a sequel that looks at how an organization that is superb in one of these areas learns how to become superb at a second or third of the three areas. That clearly will be the future best practice that outstanding enterprises will have to shoot for. I am not sure that some organizations are not already good at more than one area of focus: For example, a great investment bank (like say, Goldman Sachs) will have more innovative products than most of its competition in certain areas and will also offer great relationships. The book does not say very much specifically about how to achieve an outstanding result in any one of the proposed three areas of focus. You'll have to read other books for help there. Direct from Dell is probably good for the price/cost model for most New Economy businesses and Old Economy businesses that are subject to the New Economy. For the rest, Lean Thinking will be helpful. On the subject of relationships, the Harvey Mackey books are good, such as Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty. On innovation, everyone should read The Innovator's Dilemma. Only the Paranoid Survive is also helpful for innovators. Pick your direction today, and move forward at warp speed!
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Summary: Don't be fooled ....
Review: Notwithstanding the allegations about "book-buying" to get this book up the business charts (which I have no idea about whether they are true or not), the real disappointment here is the book's content. It falls victim to two of the most dangerous pitfalls of management books
(1) excessive post-rationalisation (e.g. "I've got a nice, simple model and by god I'm going to make these examples fit it"), and
(2) picking winners (e.g. "here some companies that are successful ... here's some things that they do ... if you do them then you'll be successful too")
meaning that the result is evangelical ("you will believe") rather than a detached, objective view of what makes some companies successful and others not. Either that - or it's just a very long way of saying (again) "stick to the knitting" ! To say that the book oversimplifies the integrated nature of the modern corporation is a massive understatement. Treat the recommendations with extreme caution ...
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Summary: Masters of the obvious
Review: The authors are masters of the obvious. If you don't agree with the premise presented in the introduction, then a read is worth your time. The premise is simply that to become market leaders, a business must choose between operational, customer or product focus then make this focus central to their mission and value proposition. This book would be good for the reading list of an intro business strategy course.
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Summary: How to Select, Focus, and Dominate
Review: The message of this important book is that "no company can succeed today by trying to be all things to all people. It must instead find the unique value that it alone can deliver to a chosen market. Why and how this is done are the two key questions the book addresses." The authors focus with rigor and precision on three different "disciplines": operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy. It remains for any company (for any organization, for that matter) to determine which of the three should be its primary discipline but all are obviously important...indeed interdependent. Nonetheless, one discipline should be pre-eminent. The authors examine dozens of companies which have concentrated primarily on one of the three "disciplines" so that they can select their customers and then narrow their focus inorder to gain and sustain dominance within their respective marketplaces. I think this book will be of substantial value to executives in any organization but of greatest value to those in organizations which are small-to-midsize. Unless they have dysfunctional management and/or defective products, their mastery of that discipline will enable them to compete more effectively against larger organizations which (obviously) have greater resources available. My own view is that as B2B and B2B2C continue to increase at exponentially greater velocity, leadership of ANY market will require mastery of customer intimacy and at least one (but preferably both) of the other two disciplines. In that event, the insights which Treacy and Wiersema share will be even more valuable.
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