- A new competitor from Korea.
- An established Japanese company that had slashed costs
and improved quality. - A new American company—or several—starting up.
- An old-line American company with a new approach.
- A longtime competitor who’s sold off a company with a
great distribution setup. - A company that now has an electronically based distribu-
tion system enabling it to slash delivery time by 75 percent.
And it found that it must accomplish new tasks:- Target the market in segments.
- Respond to new consumer demands and tastes, which
change rapidly. - Deal with gyrating currencies.
- Suffer disruptions in service from offshore suppliers, as
when their mother countries default on debt payments.
Today, the market is even more complex—although the
company bringing its new product to market need only worry
about the gyrating euro in selling to much of Europe. Niche
marketing is more and more important than Tom imagined—
it has transformed the magazine business, for example, and
special-interest magazines now seem to be the only ones that
thrive, including a raft of magazines such as Real Simple that
offer tips on how to slow down and mellow out. Guerrilla
marketing is the norm today, facilitated by the Internet. New
competitors can now appear almost overnight and wrest mar-
ket share away from corporate giants that can’t move with the
speed of light.
On Becoming a Leader