Fred Wiersema’s The New Market Leaders is about survival of the company in modern world. The book was published in 2002, and contains some predictions about which companies will succeed and which won’t, so it’s certainly interesting to read just from the point of evaluating the author’s forecasts.
Sometimes modern companies have weeks or even days to react to the competitor’s offerings. This suddenly changes the rules of the game. The most valuable asset for any 20th century company was productivity. You had more plants – you built more widgets – you earned more money. Pretty simple formula for success. Nowadays you can have multiple manufacturing facilities and still be broke.
The new market leaders consider their customers, not their facilities, to be the greatest assets. Whoever has the most loyal customers, wins. With Chinese manufacturing it’s easy to scale up your production from dozens of units to millions of units. Some companies might not encur high production costs – Google might serve 10 people a day or 1,000,000 people a day without much difference in their setup (granted, they did ramp up the hardware base to account for high traffic). Nevertheless, obtaining and keeping loyal customers would make or break a company of the 21st century.
