Leaders are disciplined.

The discipline of market leaders: choose your customer, narrow your focus, and dominate your market.  ~Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema

This quote is actually the title of a book by Treacy and Wiersema first published back in 1995.  The authors themselves will admit that this is not a highly profound concept, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for leaders to accomplish.  Here we are in 2012, 17 years later, and I still run across leaders who are struggling to embrace this concept of discipline.  And by embrace I mean behave in a way that demonstrates they believe this statement to be true.

After thinking about this and trying to better understand some of my own clients, I got an idea.  I zeroed in on four key words in this book title: discipline, choose, focus and dominate.  While each of these words is certainly very deliberate and intentional, which is something most leaders aspire to, each of these words also requires identifying what you will freely leave behind.  I think it may be the idea of freely leave behind—which for some leaders could feel like a loss, missed opportunity, or even failure— that could actually be preventing some organizations from thriving.

Synonyms of the word discipline are control, restraint and order.  For example, when we think of being disciplined about doing something (exercise, reading, spending less money, etc.) we frequently equate that with what we are “giving up” in exchange for being disciplined.  We are exhibiting control or restraining ourselves from doing one thing so that we can do another.  While the idea of discipline is nearly always viewed as a positive attribute, it is also perceived to nearly always come at a cost—the cost of freely leaving something behind.

The word choose clearly implies that we made a choice between at least two options, which in turn means we “freely left something behind.”  My favorite definition of the word focus is “a state of maximum distinctness.”  In order to be distinct, we must communicate not only what we are but also what we are not.  Again, to focus, we’ve “freely left something behind.”  Dominate means that we rule, control, or dictate something.  But we never (with a few exceptions) rule or dictate over everything, so again, something is freely left behind.

This idea to “freely leave behind” is my own notion.  My first inclination was to use the word willingly leave behind because it is something we’ve agreed to do; we are willing participants.  But when I looked up synonyms for willingly, I discovered words like eagerly, readily, gladly, cheerfully, enthusiastically and freely.  My own personal definition of willingly was a bit more subdued than Webster’s. Then I realized that Webster had it right.

As leaders, if we want to be disciplined and choose and focus and dominate then we need to embrace the liberation that comes with freely leaving behind.  We need to “leave behind” and do it eagerly, readily, gladly and even enthusiastically, and as a consequence, we will become market leaders.