The classic bestseller outlining tactics for any business striving to achieve market dominance What does your company do better than anyone else? What unique value do you provide to your customers? How will you increase that value next year? Drawing on in-depth studies and interviews with the top CEOs in the country, renowned business strategists Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema reveal that successful companies do not attempt to be everything to everyone. Instead, they win customers by mastering one of three "value disciplines": the highest quality products, the lowest prices, or the best customer experiences. From FedEx to Walmart, the companies that relentlessly focused on a single discipline not only thrived but dominated their industries, while once powerful corporations that didn't get the message, from Kodak to IBM, faltered. Presented in disarmingly simple and provocative terms, The Discipline of Market Leaders shows what it takes to become a leader in your market, and stay there, in an ever more sophisticated and demanding world.
Ask any manager to identify what's different in the new economy, and they will tell you that markets are more crowded than ever before. As a result, it is harder than ever to attract and retain customer attention. Increasingly, fresh role models are needed to determine what it takes to prosper when customers are the most precious resource. THE NEW MARKET LEADERS provides exactly that, by examining the exciting, unorthodox companies dominating the market and revolutionising business. In this eye-opening and cutting edge book, renowned business strategist Fred Wiersema offers totally new guidelines for measuring a company's success. He explains why traditional measures, such as size of the company or total sales, are no longer adequate markers of a company's prowess or future prospects. By providing new sales growth and market value indexes, Wiersema shows readers how to recognise the movers and shakers in the industry, whether internet-based or more traditional. He identifies today's 100 most influential global businesses and explains what makes them so powerful. In today's fast-paced economy, no investor or manager can afford to ignore the practical strategies and highly applicable insights offered in this important book.
One of the most important investments in an organization is its information technology (IT) infrastructure. Yet many managers are ill-prepared to make sound IT investment decisions. Drawing upon rigorous research with over 100 businesses in 75 firms in nine countries, the authors here present a wide range of IT possibilities, enabling managers to take control of decisions that many have relegated to technical staff or vendors.
What people are saying about Discount Business Strategy: "Michael Andersen and Flemming Poulfelt provide a provocative discussion of the rapidly growing role of discounters across numerous industries: how they operate; how they create uniqueness; and how they can destroy value for incumbents. Understanding the specific moves and tools that the authors analyze will be valuable for attackers and incumbents alike." —Adrian J. Slywotzky, Director, Mercer Management Consulting USA "This book is very timely, dealing with today's most critical strategic issue: how to provide more value to the consumer through aggressive discounting. Those players in manufacturing and distribution who master this will be the winners; many established firms will fall by the wayside. A similar set of issues are facing many nations today - Europe vs. Asia!" —Peter Lorange, President, IMD, Switzerland "Andersen and Poulfelt have researched one of the most important themes in today's business world - how fundamentally new business models have wiped out establishments not with new products or technologies, but by creating new rules for conventional industries. Read this book and learn how to recognize the disruption of your industry before it is too late!" —Sigurd Liljenfeldt, Senior Partner, Monitor Group, France "This book asks if a firm can have its cake and eat it too - that is, maintain high quality at low prices. My favourite example and shopping place is big box Costco. Ikea is another. A must read for a broad audience concerned about corporate survival!" —Professor Larry E. Greiner, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, USA The aspiration to adopt the right strategy still prevails over the business world. But is there a single 'best' strategy for a company? Can an organization create sustainable competitive advantage from an 'off-the-peg' strategy? And are most companies likely to craft a strategy that genuinely creates uncontested market space and makes the competition irrelevant? The answer to all these questions is probably 'No'. And the rising tide of companies like Dell, CostCo, Skype and Linux means that asking them at all may soon be futile. While strategists have foundered in old paradigms, a new breed of competitors has emerged. Value destroyers. Old-style thinking understood value destruction when it was confined to an industry and driven by a new product or technology. But what are the implications when the destruction stems from a new way of thinking - from a strategy that simultaneously creates value? The implications are enormous. Every company in every industry is potentially at risk. This risk - or opportunity - is precisely the reason for this book and its focus on exploring why and how some companies have bridged the gap between differentiator and cost leader strategies to emerge as winners in hypercompetitive markets, and what this entails in terms of value destruction and creation. Discounting organizations are here to stay - are you?
A proven approach to building market leadership in today's crowded markets, presented with case studies, entertaining stories and practical tools and advice.
Your new product has changed the rules of the market. Now, you have to change the rules for selling it . . . Providing a truly innovative product or service is the difference between life and death for companies today. But once you’ve produced it, you have to answer the next big question: How do I sell this unique offering to customers who don’t even know they have a need for it? Brian C. Burns and Tom U. Snyder compared 27 highly successful emerging-growth and start-up corporations with 78 less successful companies in similar fields. The difference, they learned, lies neither with the product nor with marketing but with the sales strategy. In short, the losers relied on conventional sales methods; the winners deployed a unique sales strategy that focused on how organizations make decisions. Selling in a New Market Space helps you develop a sales strategy to approach potential buyers the right way—the first time around—using what the authors call the “Maverick Method.” This game-changing guide explains: What Maverick sellers do differently and why they hold the key to your success Where to find salespeople with the skills for selling to a new market How to create early market segments and marginalize competitors When to transition them away from Maverick selling Don’t be a victim of your own success. What good is the product you put all that money into if you can’t sell it? If you want to get the most out of your innovative offering, you need to create a new class of salesperson. With Selling in a New Market Space, you have the tool for driving your new product to the limits of its potential.
EATING THE BIG FISH : How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded The second edition of the international bestseller, now revised and updated for 2009, just in time for the business challenges ahead. It contains over 25 new interviews and case histories, two completely new chapters, introduces a new typology of 12 different kinds of Challengers, has extensive updates of the main chapters, a range of new exercises, supplies weblinks to view interviews online and offers supplementary downloadable information.
In years past, the keywords for leaders were confidence, single-minded purpose, and strategic planning. But today’s vastly complex, globalized, and fast-evolving world requires a different kind of leadership. This game-changing book details a new approach—entrepreneurial leadership—developed at Babson College, the number-one school for entrepreneurship in the world. Entrepreneurial leadership is inspired by, but is separate from, entrepreneurship. It can be applied in any organizational situation, not just start-ups. Based on two years of extensive research, it embraces three principles that add up to a fundamentally new worldview of business and a new logic of decision making. First, rapid change and increasing uncertainty require leaders to be “cognitively ambidextrous,” able to shift between traditional “prediction logic” (choosing actions based on analysis) and “creation logic” (taking action despite considerable unknowns). Guiding this different way of thinking and acting is a new view of business, where simultaneous creation of social, environmental, and economic value is the order of the day. Finally, entrepreneurial leaders leverage their understanding of themselves and their social context to guide effective action. Each chapter offers concrete examples of how educators across all disciplines are integrating these ideas into their courses—and even their entire curricula. The New Entrepreneurial Leader lays out a comprehensive new paradigm for reinventing management education in order to mold leaders who will shape social and economic opportunity.
This book focuses on the increase in female leadership over the last fifty years, and the concrete benefits and challenges this leads to in organizations. It moves beyond the typical focus on developed, Western contexts and answers the call for research on how women in emerging markets rise above the proverbial “glass ceiling”. The authors integrate two underdeveloped topics that are highly relevant to modern business: women in leadership roles, and women in emerging markets. They examine how women leaders in a range of professional services—including accounting, consulting, law, engineering and medicine—have managed to navigate their careers while considering the role emerging markets play in their work. Based on cutting-edge research, the topics are brought to life through examples and profiles of leading women across Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. These narratives, told in the leaders’ own words, are key to understanding women’s achievements and the barriers they face. Students of leadership, diversity, gender studies, and human resource management will learn much from this insightful book.
How do markets evolve? Why are some innovations picked up straightaway whilst others take years to be commercialized? Are there first-mover advantages? Why do we behave with 'irrational exuberance' in the early evolution of markets as was the case with the dot.com boom?Paul Geroski is a leading economist who has taught economics to business school students, managers, and executives at the London Business School. In this book he explains in a refreshingly clear style how markets develop. In particular he stresses how the early evolution of markets can significantly shape their later development and structure. His purpose is to show how a good grasp of economics can improve managers' business and investment decisions. Whilst using the development of theInternet as a case in point, Geroski also refers to other sectors and products, for example cars, television, mobile phones, and personal computers.This short book is an ideal introduction for managers, MBA students, and the general reader wanting to understand how markets evolve.
