Todd S. over at 800CEORead has pointed out a new book called Big Winners and Losers

What Marcus found was that companies need to balance agility, discipline, and focus.

Ho, hum, right?

But put in the context of a raft of best-selling business books, this is framework-busting stuff.

In an excerpt from the Appendix, there’s a list of classic business bestsellers, classified by whether they’re primarily about discipline or primarily about agility.

Tom Peters “innovate everywhere” vs. Jim Collins “focus focus focus”:

Starting with Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, there has been a spate of books that purport to provide managers with the secrets to sustained competitive advantage (SCA). Jim Collins’ and Jerry Porras’ best-selling Built to Last is another work in this genre.


The problem with these books is that the prescriptions they make often are contradictory and one sided. On the one hand, they urge you to take bold steps and explore entirely new markets, technologies, and business models, or risk becoming extinct (Peters and Waterman). On the other hand, you are admonished not to divert your attention to things you know nothing about,and to take small,gradual steps to get better at what you currently do (Collins).

Their list of disciplined-focused books:

• Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
• James Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Other’s Don’t
• Robert Kaplan and David Norton, The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action
• Donald Mitchell, The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model
• Nitin Nohria, William Joyce, and Bruce Roberson, What Really Works: The 4+2 Formula for Sustained Business Success
• C.K.Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswany, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers
• Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersman, The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market
• Michael Treacy, Double Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve It No Matter What
• Chris Zook, Profit from the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence
• Chris Zook, Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots

And agility-focused:

• Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor,The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
• Sydney Finkelstein, Why Smart Executives Fail: What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes
• Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market and How to Successfully Transform Them
• Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
• Mary Kwak and David Yoffie, Judo Strategy: Turning Your Competitor’s Strength to Your Advantage
• Adrian Slywotzky, Value Migration
• Adrian Slywotzky, Richard Wise, and Karl Weber, How to Grow Markets When Markets Don’t
• Donald Sull, Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them

The excerpt includes links to the books and summaries of each book’s main arguments.