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

The authors' thesis is deceptively simple: that successful organizations - the market leaders - excel at delivering one type of value to their chosen customers. The key is focus. Market leaders choose a single "value discipline"—Best total cost, best product, or best total solution - and then build their organization around it. They sustain their leadership position not by resting on their laurels, but by offering better value year after year. Choosing one discipline to master does not mean abandoning the other two, only that a company must stake its reputation - and focus its energy and assets - on a single one to achieve success over the long term. No company can reliably succeed today by trying to be all things to all customers.^

Through detailed case studies of some of the world's best-known companies, The Discipline of Market Leaders examines the implications of each discipline from an operating standpoint, offering step-by-step guidance on choosing and implementing the right one. Each discipline demands a distinct organizational model with its own structure, processes, information systems, management systems, and culture. Treacy and Wiersema also show how to involve every member of a company's work force in the "cult of the customer," a new way of looking at work in the context of customer value. 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? If you can't easily answer these questions, then The Discipline of Market Leaders is required reading.^

Because the companies that can answer these questions are raising the value bar in their industries, creating new customer expectations, and staking their claim to market leadership.