Читать книгу Digital Disciplines - Wiersema Fred - Страница 5

Marketplace success is much sought after, but hard to achieve. In most industries, only a handful of firms manage to outperform the majority of their contenders. Their shining results make them stand out – in terms of customer appeal, financial results, or growth prospects. Yet even they are subject to decline in a turbulent world where customer power and buyers' demands are mounting relentlessly.

Attaining market leadership is no sinecure. This was already evident some 20 years ago in the research that led to my coauthored book The Discipline of Market Leaders, a #1 bestseller that was published in 18 languages. The fundamental and lasting truth exemplified by the market-leading companies featured in that work, as well as the many outperformers I have studied since, is that they succeeded by not being all things to all people. Instead, they developed and honed the discipline to deliver unsurpassed value to particular customer segments on just those dimensions most pertinent to these customers – such as best total cost, best solutions, or best products. On top of that, they recognized the imperative to provide better value year after year in order to sustain their appeal to ravenous and switch-prone customers – whether through faster, cheaper, and better offerings, special treatment, or otherwise.

Then as well as now, customers want more – and they want to be delighted and surprised. Today nothing has more power to surprise than the digital juggernaut that is transforming marketplaces around the world.

In my research 20 years ago, the Internet barely registered as a crucial component of market leadership. The word internetworking appeared just once in my book, and the term digital did not come up at all. How things have changed. Today, technology is a pervasive strategic force in any market-leading company that I know, and is getting recognized as such in a rapidly growing number of other firms. In light of that, it is no surprise that as of April 2015, the world's highest-ranking companies by stock market capitalization were Apple and Google, with Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, and Amazon not far behind, and that most of the fastest-growing enterprises can be found in the digital field.

Considering the rampant growth and importance of digital capabilities, Joe Weinman's Digital Disciplines could not be more timely. The immense merit of his work lies in illuminating how the dizzying array of current and emerging digital technologies are shaping and transforming the ways that companies create better customer value and, hence, attain market leadership. His insights and case studies provide a blueprint for companies of all sizes in all industries to upgrade their strategies so as to compete effectively in the digital era. The connection of his four digital disciplines with the enduring disciplines of market leaders that were outlined in my earlier book is uncanny. To me, Digital Disciplines shows how technology is super-charging the way customer value gets created. Weinman, in effect, is putting my original disciplines on steroids.

Digital Disciplines provides rich and interesting detail as to technology's potential and impact on customer strategy. Even with a pretty good grasp of the subject matter, I found the book eye-opening, especially in terms of the multitude of possibilities it covers that are worth exploring, and the dangers that could befall those who do not fully appreciate the necessities of the digital era.

Fred Wiersema

Customer Strategist, Chair of the B2B Leadership Board,

Institute for the Study of Business Markets at Penn State, and

coauthor of the top-selling The Discipline of Market Leaders