The discipline of market leaders
Why is it that Casio can sell a calculator more cheaply than Kellogg's can sell a box of corn flakes? Why can FedEx "absolutely, positively" deliver your package overnight but airlines have trouble keeping track of your bags? Why does Lands' End remember your last order and even your family's clothing sizes but after ten years of membership American Express still solicits you to join? How is it that some companies are reinventing competition in their markets while others are seemingly oblivious to the changing world around them? These are the questions that authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema explore in their groundbreaking book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, from the same consulting firm that brought you business reengineering. The answers provide a revolutionary way of thinking about customers, competition, markets, and the fundamental structure of your organization.^ 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.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
37mentions
6people
2009–2025years
86% recommend14% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- While there is certainly a lot of crap out there for business books, especially on sales/marketing and management, there are some core books that are must reads if you want to save 30 years of trial and error.
1. E-myth Revisited (absolute must read for small to midsize business owners) 2. Competitive Strategy 3. Discipline of Market Leaders 4. Good to Great 5. Built to Last
- A few that come to mind.
Fiction:
Neuromancer - William Gibson
False Memory - Dean Koontz
The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
Non-fiction:
The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Discipline of Market Leaders - Fred Wiersema and Michael Treacy
- Offhand I can think of a few that I've read at least 2-3 times. And in a couple of cases, maybe as many as 4 or 5 times. There are probably some others that just aren't jumping to mind, but suffice it to say that these are all books I've found very valuable.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
Mastering the Complex Sale - Jeff Thull
How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
- So here's the rub: if you've already built an MVP, but have only spoken with 3 prospects to date, you're kinda going about this wrong (IMO). You should probably have spoken to dozens of prospects before writing a single line of code. Probably multiple dozens, actually. You shouldn't be writing any code at all until you already have a pretty good idea that the problem you're trying to solve is real AND that customers have at least some interest in a solution like what you're proposing to create.
There's also no real point in running ads when all you have is an MVP. Ads are for demand generation once you have a really solid handle on the problem, the product, sales channels, etc.
My suggestion would be the following:
1. Stop writing code or doing any development work
2. Cut expenses to the bone by any means necessary so that you're "default alive" no matter what (for the foreseeable future anyway)
3. Get yourself a copy of The Four Steps to the Epiphany[1] by Steve Blank. Read it. Then read it again.
4. Go through the customer development process as outlined by Blank, and start talking to prospects.
5. Don't start writing code again until/unless you sync up to that point where the process has you starting to take an MVP out to show to prospects.
6. Pick up from there and follow the process.
Now an exception would be this: you talk about a mature market. IF there are already plenty of well established, mature, market proven solutions that do more or less the same thing as your proposed solution, then you can skip some of the validation stuff. I mean, you could guarantee that you're at least building "something people want" by just copying one or more of your competitors. BUT... if all you're doing is copying a competitor, you have to ask "why would a customer buy your solution instead of theirs?"
Ideally in that case, you have some vision or idea for a "thing" that distinguishes your solution from the others on the market. In that case, though, you still have to validate that the market players actually see your proposed solution as better than the other solutions OR you need to be "at least as good as the others" but significantly cheaper, or something.
In terms of addressing all of that, a couple of books I'd suggest reading include:
1. The Discipline of Market Leaders[2]
2. Differentiate or Die[3]
3. Zero to One[4]
4. Traction[5]
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Successful-Strate...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Market-Leaders-Customers-D...
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Differentiate-Die-Survival-Killer-Com...
[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...
[5]: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...
- It's rarely the case that there's only room for one player in a given market. Market segmentation is a real thing, for good reasons. If $BIGCO pivots to producing a product similar to yours, that doesn't have to mean "the end". I'd suggest everybody read The Discipline of Market Leaders for more on how to choose among different strategies and position yourself vis-a-vis competitors.
Of course the problem of fundamentally building on someone else's platform remains. This is why it's a good idea to start at least thinking about how to move your business onto another platform, from day zero. Of course there's a balance between investing time and money in building abstraction layers and evaluating other platforms and doing these different things, versus spending that time and money on immediate growth. But if one invests literally 0 in this situation, they can hardly expect much sympathy if the underlying platform gets yanked out from underneath them and kills their business.
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Discipline of Market Leaders - Fred Wiersema and Michael Treacy
It's Not the Big that Eat the Small...It's the Fast that Eat the Slow - Jason Jennings
Mastering The Complex Sale - Jeff Thull
How To Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard
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