Digital Disciplines: Attaining Market Leadership via the Cloud, Big Data, Social, Mobile, and the Internet of Things

Foreword

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 ...