Business Bestseller Drives Home Importance of Providing Value : Management: Authors of ‘Disciplines of Market Leaders’ show how some companies give customers a hard time and others give them what they want.

Michael Treacy is precise in describing “Disciplines of Market Leaders,” the book he wrote with Fred Wiersema on successfully managing a business.

The theme is simple, he said: “Make sure you offer unmatched value.”

That, you might think, would be as obvious to the owner of the local doughnut shop as to the chief of a Fortune 500 corporation. But maybe not. The idea is selling--more than 200,000 copies, according to Treacy.

Moreover, any publication that hasn’t reviewed the book, or business person who can’t talk about it, may be viewed as behind the times. The consultant-authors are in demand, not just by talk shows but by corporate clients.

“We’ve been working very hard to get the message out,” Treacy says.

The message is to focus on one of three “value disciplines”--the best total cost, the best product or service or the best total package--and then build the company around it without forsaking the other two.

The examples they use are memorable, and they repeat them over and over in their publicity, so often that they are often well known even to those who haven’t read the book.

“Why is it,” the book begins, “that Casio can sell a calculator more cheaply than Kellogg’s can sell a box of cornflakes. . . .

“That it takes only a few minutes and no paperwork to pick up or drop off a rental car at Hertz’s 1 Club Gold, but twice that time and an annoying name-address form to check into a Hilton hotel. . . .

“That you can get a bright, cheerful, informed L.L. Bean salesperson to take your catalogue order, but after spending much more money on premiums, you can hardly get an Aetna health-insurance claims rep to answer your call?”

The answer: “They know they have to redefine value by raising customer expectations in the one component of value they choose to highlight.” They offer unmatched value and in return receive unmatched customer support.

Treacy agrees that this is often and clearly understood by entrepreneurs just starting out in business--the better cost, the better product, the better total solution to a customer’s needs. He even concedes it is just common sense.

The mystery seems to be in how the message is lost, as it most certainly seems to be, based on the complaints of millions of customers. How do corporate chiefs lose their perspective?

“It’s a matter of visibility,” he said. “They have many constituencies begging for their time: shareholders, employees, customers. And often, they have the least contact with customers.”

While dealing with the internal mechanics of the company, they lose sight of the simple perspective of their customer. They cannot think as a customer, he said. And businesses, he reminds us, must deliver value to customers.

Without malice, customers can trap companies into complacency, further obstructing the visibility. “Often, they are a lot more patient than employees and shareholders,” Treacy said. “They allow the boss to get further behind.”

He explained that ‘customers can be creatures of habit, or they might be affluent enough to accept just a good deal rather than a great one.” Rather than switch, he said, they may just stay with a deteriorating value.

Judging from its swift growth, the consulting company behind the book, CSC Index of Cambridge, Mass.--Wiersema works for it and Tracy’s company is allied with it--is delivering what customers value.

James Champy, one of its founders, and consultant Michael Hammer, probably did more than any other consultants to put “re-engineering” into the business lexicon, writing the 1993 best-seller “Reengineering the Corporation.”

Both books stress a return to fundamental notions, perspectives and goals that guided businesses when they were founded, and then describe how to reorganize around them to achieve bottom-line and customer goals.