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The digital disciplines framework is a direct descendent of the value disciplines model conceived in the early 1990s by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema in their Harvard Business Review article titled “Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines”36 and their seminal, best-selling book The Discipline of Market Leaders.37 Before delving into digital disciplines in the next chapter, it's essential to develop a baseline understanding of the original value disciplines and related strategy frameworks.

Perhaps business success is just serendipity, but over the past few decades, there have been hundreds – if not thousands – of attempts to determine why some firms succeed while others fail; why some companies or industries are highly profitable and others aren't; and to develop models, frameworks, repeatable processes, and insights that businesses can utilize.

Some strategists, such as visiting professor Gary Hamel of the London Business School and the late professor C. K. Prahalad of the University of Michigan, have argued for what might be called an inside-out view. They claimed that companies should build on their core competencies to offer new products and services or enter entirely new markets. One example that they highlighted is NEC, which identified three major evolutionary trends in the 1970s: from mainframe to distributed processing; from simple components to complex integrated circuits; and from mechanical/analog telecommunications to digital. By focusing on developing deep internal knowledge and skills including process technologies in these areas, and leveraging those competencies into interrelated products and businesses, NEC grew into a global leader.38 Today, we see companies like Tesla taking a core competency such as lithium-ion batteries and using it to expand beyond cars into home energy storage.39

Other strategists, such as professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School, have been primarily concerned with a firm's competitive strategy, so their focus is outward, but primarily oriented to competition, not customers. In Porter's five forces framework, customers, often referred to as buyers, are just one of the five major considerations for strategy – others being suppliers, substitute products or services, the threat of new competitors entering the business, and the intensity of rivalry among existing competitors.

Yet another approach to strategy would be to work from the outside in, starting from the customer perspective backwards to the firm's positioning and strategic architecture. Treacy and Wiersema did just this, and after studying 40 companies for several years, concluded that companies could lead their industry through the delineation and delivery of differentiated customer value in one of three ways, which they called value disciplines: operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy.