The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market Review

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The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market ReviewThis book's concepts for strategic marketing management are so widely accepted that the popular Balanced Scorecard concept of Kaplan and Norton in 2001 decided to adopt the ideas for the "customer perspective".
The authors manage to take Michael Porter's two generic competitive strategies - Differentiation and Cost Leader - and elaborate on these to an extent never presented so elegantly before. In the process, they discover a third generic strategy - Customer Intimacy.
Thus, Treacy and Wiersema distinguish between focusing on the following value dimensions:
- Operational excellence (cost leadership / focus on supply chain management)
- Product leadership (innovation / focus on product lifecycle management)
- Customer Intimacy (service leadership /focus on customer relationship management)

These are the FOUR RULES that govern market leaders' actions:
Rule 1: Provide the best offering in the marketplace by excelling in a specific dimension of value
Rule 2: Maintain threshold standards on the other dimensions of value
Rule 3: Dominate your market by improving value year after year
Rule 4: Build a well-tuned operating model dedicated to delivering unmatched value
Expanding on the fourth rule - operating models - may the best long-term contribution of this book. The authors explain in detail and via case stories how the operating models differ for each of the three value propositions. In practice, I've learned that by explaining the operating models, many people can easier find themselves depicted than in the overall generic dimensions of cost, service or product leadership.
OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE or Cost Leadership - Best total cost - operating model:
Key success factor: Formula!
Golden rule: Variety kills efficiency
Culture: Disciplined teamwork; Process focused; Conformance, "one size fits all" mindset
Organization: Centralized functions; high skills at the core of the organization
Core processes: Product delivery and basic service cycle; built on standard, no frills fixed assets
Management Systems: Command and control; Compensation fixed to cost and quality; transaction profitability tracking
Information Technology: Integrated, low-cost transaction systems; Mobile and remote technologies
PRODUCT LEADERSHIP - Best product - operating model:
Key success factor: Talent!
Golden rule: Cannibalize your success with breakthroughs
Culture: Concept, future driven; Experimentation, "out of the box" mindset; Attack, go for it, win
Organization: Ad-hoc, organic, and cellular; High skills abound in loose-knit structures
Core processes: Invention, Commercialisation; Market exploitation; Disjoint work procedures
Management Systems: Decisive, risk oriented; Reward individuals' innovation capacity; Product lifecycle profitability
Information Technology: Person-to-person communications systems; Technologies enabling cooperation and knowledge management
CUSTOMER INTIMACY - Best total solution - operating model:
Key success factor: Solution!
Golden rule: Solve the client's broader problem
Culture: Client and filed driven; Variation: "Have it your way" mindset
Organization: Entrepreneurial client teams; High skills in the field
Core processes: Client acquisition and development; Solution development; Flexible and responsive work procedures
Management Systems: Revenue and share-of-wallet driven; Rewards based in part on client feedback; Lifetime value of client
Information Technology: Customer databases linking internal and external information; Knowledge bases built around expertise
If you're interested in Customer Intimacy, you may want to add Wiersema's additional book on only this strategy to your shopping basket. I highly recommend both paperback books ... great value for money ;-)
Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-businessThe Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market Overview

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If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently Review

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If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently ReviewLike many Disney rides, you have to wait a bit to get this book on amazon (I purchased mine directly from the publisher). But it's worth the wait. I attended the ACHE Conference in 3/2005 where the book was named the "2005 Book of the Year."
Fred Lee has written a fantastic book in "If Disney Ran Your Hospital." Not only is it a well-written book (Lee uses memorable examples, stories, and graphs to illustrate his points), but also he has chosen an outstanding topic. We need more books like this - learning from the best from other industries. Lee effectively builds the bridge, taking Disney corporate realities and turning them into approaches and strategies that hospital leaders can easily digest and apply in their hospitals.
Some of the concepts definitely stretch my current mindset on customer service (and after reading the book, you might even stop using that term). Lee talks about why perceptions are more important than reality, patient loyalty is more important than satisfaction, courtesy is more important than efficiency, and experience is more important than service. He also spends some time addressing the shortfalls of patient satisfaction surveys and competitive incentives for employees. All for the sake of his true focus of the book: to "bring out the best behaviors in workers and provide the best emotional experience for patients."
For those that are experts in services marketing or world-class hotel corporate culture, some of the concepts will be old news. Nonetheless, the way Lee specifically applies these concepts to the hospital setting is truly magical and novel.If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently Overview

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The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary Review

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The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary Review
This short book focuses on a mailman Mark Sanborn met, a man named Fred. When the author first met Fred, Fred took an effort to get to know his new customer, and find ways to do a better job as a mailman. This book about the value of doing a better job, how to build relationships, and why we should take initiative. In short by going the extra mile we'll have a better life, and others will benefit.
It is a good book, and a short book. It is well written. The book is entertaining and at the same time makes many good points.
The first of four sections covers how the author met Fred the mailman, and how very quickly the author realized that Fred was a superstar mail carrier. The basics of what a "Fred" is are explored, and then the author mentions sightings of other "Freds."
The second section explains how you can become a Fred. Basically you need to build relationships with others so you know them well enough to then be able to be create, take initiative and make a difference.
The third section gives pointers on how you can help others grow into being Freds. The basic steps are to:
1) Find - how do you recognize a Fred
2) Reward - how should Freds be rewarded
3) Educate - how help people improve their Fredness
4) Demonstrate - model the correct behavior
The final section recounts the value and importance of being a Fred.
This is a book worth reading. It provides a good reminder and motivation to go the extra mile and do a better job.
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How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In Review

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How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In ReviewLet me preface this review by saying that I am a fan of Collins' earlier work. Built to Last was a great book, and Good to Great was very good. How the Mighty Fall, however, is neither. The issue of corporate failure is critical, particularly in the current downturn. Unfortunately, the core of Collins' analysis in this book is flawed.
How the Mighty Fall addresses two related questions: Why do good companies fail? and how does management respond once a company gets into trouble? Collins introduces a five stage model to answer these questions, where steps one and two address the roots of corporate failure and steps three through five managements' response.
Collins' analysis of management response to decline--denial of risk, grasping for salvation, and capitulation to irrelevance or death--accurately describe how leaders respond to deterioration in their business. This analysis here is solid, the writing clear, and the tempo brisk. Collins does a particularly good job of describing dysfunctional leadership behaviors of companies is in decline.
Collins' analysis of why companies get into trouble in the first place is much less compelling. Companies fail, according to Collins, when success breeds managerial hubris, which leads to overreach and ultimately failure. Like many of Collins' findings, this makes intuitive sense. Unfortunately in this case, his core argument runs counter to research on hundreds of companies, conducted over decades by dozens of scholars. There are two major flaws in Collins argument.
First, he claims that companies get into trouble because they overreach and expand beyond their core. This is consistent with data showing that diversified companies trade at a discount to focused rivals. Recent research published in the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Finance has established that the companies often diversify to escape decline in their core business. Overreach is a symptom--not a cause--of decline and thus cannot explain its roots.
Second, Collins ignores a rich body of research that finds decline sets in not because companies stray from their core, but because they stick too close to it. Clay Christensen's research on disruptive technology, for example, demonstrates that companies stumble when they stay too close to their established customers and fail to serve emerging segments. The competency trap literature finds that companies get locked in by what they do well and struggle to adapt when circumstances change. Hubris and overreach, of course, play a role in corporate decline, but a well-established body of research suggests that they are rarely the root causes.
How did Collins, who does many things right in his research, get his core finding so wrong in this case? As always he tackles a big and important question, and his pairing of comparable companies is a sensible research design. His failure to read or acknowledge a rich body of previous research that bears directly on his research question, in this case, has led him to rather facile observations. In research, as in business, a lack of humility in recognizing the contributions of others can lead to overreach.
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