A few years ago, I read a New York Times bestseller, The Discipline of the Market Leaders, by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema. Since its publication, I have heard a lot of managers quoting from it. In this bestseller, authors Treacy and Wiersema describe three strategies: product leadership, operational excellence, and customer intimacy. My fellow executives translate these as product, price, and service, and we all generally agree that to compete, "You have to be good at two, and be excellent at the third."

Last week I read ValueSpace by Mittal & Sheth. It changed my interpretation of Treacy and Wiersema's book. I realized how wrong every manager's understanding of Treacy and Wiersema's book had been. The confusion is between the Marketspace and Valuespace. Treacy/Wiersema's book tells us WHAT market to compete in (Marketspace); Mittal/Sheth's book tells us HOW to compete in the chosen market (ValueSpace). Their discussion of this distinction in Chapter 12 was an eye-opener. They also do a great job of tying up the theme of their book with the themes of other business bestsellers, such as Tom Peter's In Search of Excellence and Collins and Porras' Built to Last.

I highly recommend this book to anyone concerned with business strategy. If you have read other bestsellers on business strategy, you can't afford to miss this one. I only wish the authors had made Chapter 12 as their first chapter. . My suggestion would be to read Chapter 12 first. Then the rest of the book would be doubly meaningful.

I read the book purely out of curiosity. I co-manage a high tech company so at first I was disappointed since none of the high tech companies are included in the book. But I started reading it anyway because I wanted to read what some of the famous companies like Caterpillar and UPS are doing to gain market-leadership. Although some of the company stories get to be tedious, most are useful and fun to read. And even though none is from a high tech company, it gave me ideas for my own business. Now whenever I am faced with a customer problem, I would be thinking of one or the other story to come up with my own innovative ways of solving the customer's problem and to meet his or her value requirements. Beyond the stories, what I found useful is the customer value framework the authors offer. At first, it looks deceptively basic and simple; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed valuable. Its simplicity is a good thing. Authors claim that it is comprehensive - I am not sure yet, but so far every value creation activity I could think I could fit into the framework. And I could apply it to my company. Indeed the framework is applicable to any company in any industry. The book offers nothing in the way of quick-fix. And when you finish reading it, don't expect to run with excitement, eager to implement something. Rather, the book's framework gives you a template to use in long term, cool-headed, planning. It does not matter if you are a small business or a large business, and if you are a established company or a start up, the book's framework will be a handy tool for constantly thinking about various avenues of creating "unusual and complete" customer value.

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ValueSpace? What is it? What does it do for my business?

We are constantly asked these questions since the book's release. They are best answered by us in the preface, excerpted below.

PREFACE

ValueSpace -we hold it in utmost admiration.

ValueSpace-it is to us the be-all and the end-all of all business activity; the only purpose of all businesses. It is the only justifiable goal of all reengineering, organizational renewal, entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. And it is the only path for sustained growth; for winning the battle for market leadership. It is the space where true market value is created. For shareholders; for employees; and, most of all, for customers. We present in this book a blueprint on how companies can build enduring ValueSpace for their customers.

This book is at the intersection of our two long-held obsessions: As university professors, we view ourselves as lifelong learners; and for decades, we have been students of customer behavior on the one hand and business organizations on the other. We have studied theories of customer behavior-indeed created some of them ourselves--, and for decades, we have observed, analyzed, and written about business processes, precepts, and practices. In this book, we bring these two streams together-our knowledge of customers and our knowledge of businesses. This is our ValueSpace for you, the reader: Uniquely in the current sea of business advice books, we combine the customer and business perspectives.

We set out to understand what constitutes value for the customer and how companies can create it. With financial support from the Marketing Science Institute (a Cambridge-based nonprofit research organization), .. we studied 11 Fortune's Most Admired Companies. ... Our framework, comprising the components of ValueSpace and its drivers, is quintessential-no matter what else you do or do not do, you must create these value components. Our framework is enduring-it is not the "project of the month"; long after the current fads have vanished, you must still build the value components we describe. Our framework is universal-it applies to all companies: manufacturing and service; small business or global enterprises, business-to-business or business-to-consumer; physical or digital; dot-com or not-com.

We intend this book to be a blueprint for thought as well as practice. We present conceptual framework to help you plan; we provide a self-audit form that you can use to assess your company's current standing in the ValueSpace; and we present case histories, stories of the most admired companies, and insights from executive interviews that you would find both inspirational and actionable. It is a hands-on guide to launching your journey into the customer ValueSpace.

Our own journey has been fascinating; we have learned a lot-from the Most Admired Companies we studied; from the executive interviews we did specifically for this research; and from thousands of conversations over the years with consumers, mangers, and corporate leaders just like yourselves. It is a pleasure and privilege to share with you our view of Customer ValueSpace, and our total fascination with it.

(End of Preface) * * *

VALUESPACE FOR BUSINESS EXECUTIVES

How You Can Use the Book:

Knowledge is the foundation for all strategy and sound executive action. This book will give you:

a. A Perspective: A framework for thinking about your customers' ValueSpace, and indeed about your business itself.

b. A Strategic Planning Tool. The book contains an Audit self-survey both for nine ValueSpace components and 40 driver processes. You can use this tool to assess your company's current standing and then plan action to move forward in the ValueSpace.

c. As an Account Planning Tool. For each major customer, you can identify the gaps in the ValueSpace you can fill.

d. As an Executive Training Tool. As a platform for Executive Training, the book can inform, guide, and frame the continuing education experiences in corporate universities and in-house Executive training centers.

Once you adopt the ValueSpace thinking, the potential to explore avenues of value creation are limited only by your creativity and vision.

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SELECTED EXCERPTS

Value, not money, is the basic currency of all human interaction. When we meet someone, we try to quickly assess how long would it be worth our while to be talking to that person. If an incoming phone call shows up on our called ID, we promptly decide if we would gain anything by taking the call at that time. If we get 10 letters in the mail, we look through them and choose to open only those that we expect to contain some information of value to us. This is even more true for marketplace exchanges.... ...

Companies that invent new values such as these possess certain traits. They observe customers real close. They dig customer need to its essential core. And they keep their eyes on a singular target: creating far fetched new ValueSpace for the customer. These traits indeed lead a business to mold its own self-concept in the customer's image. Rosenbluth redefines the very nature of its business as "business interaction management." And 3M comes to view itself, instead of being a maker of masking tapes, abrasive papers, and adhesives, as a provider of bonding, protection, and masking solutions.....

This reinvention of oneself as a corporate being, this customer-centered adoption of a new self-identity, the constant contemplation of the customer desires -this is what it takes to invent unparalleled ValueSpace for the customer. This is what it takes to win the battle for market leadership. This is what it takes to thrive.

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IN CONCLUSION

We hope you enjoy the book. We will certainly be grateful for your feedback. You can send it to us at BanMittal@MyValueSpace.com.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

I am responsible for managing large corporate accounts, and this book has dramatically changed my perspectives in terms of how I view my role with clients.In Clients for Life, the authors have succeeded brilliantly at a difficult task: defining the essence of long-term, value-added relationships and the characteristics of professionals who succeed in developing them. This is by far the best and most sophisticated book I have read on the subject of client relationships. It is genuinely insightful, beautifully written, and full of entertaining, relevant anecdotes about working with and advising clients. Sheth and Sobel organize the book around the key attributes of professionals who are able to become great advisors to their clients and develop lifetime relationships with them. They describe these qualities with depth and freshness, and their model rings true. Many people talk about "big picture thinking," for example, or "integrity," but the authors actually define these things in a meaningful way and clearly demonstrate how you can improve yourself. Each chapter profiles a famous historical advisor who was especially skilled at dealing with clients. Much of what I have read on client relationship management has tended to be either simplistic and focused on "techniques" or else overly academic. Clients for Life, in contrast, is a breezy read yet very rich and thoughtful in its approach-it'll make you think hard about your own personal and professional development. I highly recommend this book to anyone who manages clients (corporations or individuals, for that matter) or large customer relationships.

Don Mitchell's review is first-rate. I agree completely with his reasons for praising this book, and, I agree completely with his (and Drucker's) comments about so-called "lifelong relationships." If you are looking for some rock-solid advice to achieve "breakthrough" relationships with clients, Sheth and Sobel provide it. But as Mitchell and Drucker correctly point out, it is possible but highly unlikely that those relationships can be sustained indefinitely, especially now when change is the only constant and occurs at ever-increasing velocity. Give careful thought to the word "breakthrough" because it has so many relevancies to today's competitive marketplace. When in pursuit of a prospective client, first you have to break through clutter to become visible; then you have to break through other clutter to differentiate yourself from the competition; then overcome other clutter to begin the new relationship; finally, you have to break through still more clutter to sustain that relationship. (Think about juggling handgrenades in a minefield at 2 AM...during an electrical storm...while wearing a blindfold.) Sheth and Sobel offer a wealth of information as well as sound guidance. Much of what they share can also help with the formulation of customer recapture strategies. But take no one and nothing for granted. The "life" of a customer relationship should not be measured in terms of years; rather, in terms of how effectively you nourish that relationship while you have it.

This book deserves more than five stars.

The Rule of Three is well-documented, easy to read and understand, is filled with practical advice that can be used for many strategic purposes. Regardless of your industry, the size of your business, and your ambitions, you will be well rewarded by the time you spend with this book. It will provide a useful perspective of the sort that you probably have gained from books like The Innovator's Dilemma, The Discipline of Market Leaders, and The New Market Leaders.

For a quick overview of the book, I suggest you begin by reading the clear summary of key points on pages 200-202.

The idea that most industries will eventually be dominated by three broad-scale suppliers with a few profitable specialists was one I first heard from Bruce Henderson, CEO of The Boston Consulting Group, about 1972. My quick look around at the time showed that this pattern did frequently occur (domestic autos, breakfast cereal, and beer came to mind then). This industry structure is more often present now than it was then due to the massive consolidations through acquisitions and business failures that have happened in the United States and world wide. Since learning about the empirical observation, I have usually seen the point applied to the questions of how a market leader could most effectively put pressure on the third largest company in the industry and vice versa. The Rule of Three goes well beyond that scope.

As a result, I was delighted to see that the authors of this fine book have provided extensive empirical documentation of their observations by listing many different industries where this structure occurred, case examples from dozens of old and new industries, and definitions of what can trigger this development. Of particular value to readers will be the detailed descriptions of the strategies that are most likely to succeed and fail, and the most frequent causes of those outcomes.

The detailed observations were usually spot on. I only detected a few places where I disagreed with points that were made. For example, EMC was listed in an appendix as being in the computer peripheral industry along with companies that mostly make PC peripherals. I see EMC as mainly competing instead with the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, Dell and Storage Networks. The authors also argue that the large general competitors usually enjoy a stock-price multiple over the specialist, niche players who have high returns. I would argue that it is usually just the opposite.

I thought that the problem of the #4, #5, #6 and so forth general suppliers was well described as falling into "the ditch" where the lowest returns on assets are earned. These companies lack the benefits of being a specialist and the scale of being a leader. Often, they succumb. If they can merge to become or join a top company, then the situation may change.

I was pleased to see that the authors described how a company may "change the rules" citing how Starbucks has made progress against the traditional coffee suppliers (Maxwell House, Folger's, and Nestle) by providing more accessible, better quality coffee at a higher price. The main opportunity to strengthen the book would have been to discuss this point with more examples and in more detail.

I also enjoyed the discussion of how specialist companies can be lured into chasing unprofitable market share, and falling by the wayside as a result.

Many authors with an empirical theory like this one would try to avoid talking about situations where one company has almost all the market share (such as occurs in personal computer software), or two companies get almost all the business (as in commercial airframe manufacturers), or even four (as often occurs in Europe and Japan). The authors actually strengthened their main point by examining those exceptions to their rule, and showing the influences that made these results occur.

As someone who is interested in uncontrollable forces that can influence industry structure, I thought that the focus here was good although much simpler than the detailed lists that Professor Michael Porter provides.

Having understood these points, I encourage you to think through how you could use these forces against the current market leaders. As the book suggests, the leaders' efficiencies and size make them vulnerable to nimble competitors offering new business models that serve customers and stakeholders in more ways than by lowering costs. Like the cataclysmic event that killed off the dinosaurs, new business models can doom the existing leaders to being poorly fit for the new environment.

Look for the ultimate competitive advantage!

This is a great book for anyone who wants to take his or her client relationships to the highest possible level. I am intimately familiar with a vast amount of literature on selling, but nothing I've read does as good a job at getting to the heart of what really creates lasting relationships. Clients for Life is interesting, entertaining, and successfully blends practical examples and cases with higher-level concepts. As head of global sales & marketing for a technology company, I manage large, sophisticated Fortune-500 accounts, and I found a great deal of original, immediately-usable insight in this book.

In Clients for Life, the authors have succeeded brilliantly at a difficult task: defining the essence of long-term, value-added relationships and the characteristics of professionals who succeed in developing them. This is by far the best and most sophisticated book I have read on the subject of client relationships. It is genuinely insightful, beautifully written, and full of entertaining, relevant anecdotes about working with and advising clients. Sheth and Sobel organize the book around the key attributes of professionals who are able to become great advisors to their clients and develop lifetime relationships with them. They describe these qualities with depth and freshness, and their model rings true. Many people talk about "big picture thinking," for example, or "integrity," but the authors actually define these things in a meaningful way and clearly demonstrate how you can improve yourself. Each chapter profiles a famous historical advisor who was especially skilled at dealing with clients. Much of what I have read on client relationship management has tended to be either simplistic and focused on "techniques" or else overly academic. Clients for Life, in contrast, is a breezy read yet very rich and thoughtful in its approach-it'll make you think hard about your own personal and professional development. I highly recommend this book to anyone who manages clients or large customer relationships.

This is one of the most fresh, insightful and frankly interesting business books I've read in a long time. It goes to the heart of how you add value with your clients, using highly original examples and frameworks that include some fascinating profiles of famous advisors like JP Morgan and David Ogilvy.I found the chapter on judgment ("An Eye for Winners") the clearest and most thought-provoking discussion of this subject I've ever come across; other chapters on trust, independence, big-picture thinking, and the pitfalls of client relationships were equally penetrating. This book is about much more than keeping clients--it really describes how to become a great contributor to any type of business relationship, whether with a client, a boss, or as a mentor to someone. This is a gem of insight that can help readers transform their role with clients.

the bookwritten by different angle from traditional textbook. It defined the consumer with three players, user, payer, buyer. In the content, it is very systematic to accumulate and practice the same concept for different cases. It enlarges the view of the consumer behavior. It also successfully to integrate the business consumer and individual consumer as a general consumer.

This book attempts to pull together the latest thinking on relationship marketing from America, the UK and Europe. It is a very good reference book for someone carrying out academic study in the field. It is biased towards business to business and services and admits that relationship marketing is not as well documented in the area of mass market products.

This book is no better than any of the other graduate level marketing books that are available. You might think that since this book has 15 authors it might have something that books with only 3 authors lacks. But, if you thought this you'd be wrong. This book offers nothing new and its extremely high price makes it even less appealing.

This book combines the knowledge of excellent scholars of marketing in a clear and structured format which is accessible to undergraduates. In addition, the cases and other teaching materials provide excellent support.

As a Telecom executive with a national firm, I must keep current with future trends in the industry. I was under the impression that this detailed volume would provide a refreshingly new view of telecom's Tomorrow but the content is obsolete and dated. The predicted trends have not come about, and noted technologies are obsolete. My personal opinion is that more thought should have been given to the industry trends and innovations.

I feel the next volume should be split up into smaller volumes, which offer short-term predictions, and more timely technologies.