The Discipline of Market Leaders written by Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema present several import concepts that we used in a large Nike project.
The book provides a business model based on three dimensions called 'Value Disciplines":
1. Customer Intimacy
2. Product Leadership
3. Operational Excellence
and postulates that any successful business needs to maintain at least "acceptable" levels of performance in each of the three dimensions but would need to choose one of them to become a market leader in its field. The model suggests that if you truly want to excel in any of the three disciplines you will have to make sacrifices in the other two as these become mutually exclusive.
