Transforming a Kingdom Mentality

As little as two decades ago, a large number of American companies operated in kingdom environments.  Most of those environments are gone, transformed into  battlegrounds or jungles by the pressures of globalization, technology, increased efficiency, and the ever-increasing demands for improved quality and low prices. 

Under this old model, most business activity took place in the lower left triangle of the market environment matrix.  Today, however, the great majority of activity is shifting to the upper right.


One of the biggest problems facing American corporations today is that they are competing in jungles or battlegrounds, while still attempting to function using a kingdom structure and mentality.  By now it should be obvious that this arrangement leads, at best, to serious dysfunction, and at worst to financial failure.  Nevertheless, this is still a pervasive problem in the American business landscape. 

At the heart of such a change is an awareness of the difference between how things used to be and how they are now.  The goal used to be to dominate the market and thereby control prices and margins.  The goal today, however, is often to maintain a large enough piece of the market to be considered a major player, and thereby to partly determine the direction of that market. 

It hardly needs to be said that this change has enormous ramifications for every aspect of an organization. 


Simply put, most large American corporations must not only learn to live with a less-than-dominant position (at least with some of their products), but they must also redesign their structures, functions, and strategies to succeed in a non-kingdom market environment. 

While this is a large and difficult task, it is not Herculean.  In any event, the only alternative is to resist change, stay the current course, and pray for divine (or governmental) intervention. 

In short, American organizations (and quite a few non-American ones) need to bring themselves into alignment with their market environments, or else choose to work in those environments with which they find themselves already aligned.  This second option, unfortunately, is not always readily available. 

We must each accept the task of taking a close, hard look at our own organizations.  But in order to do so, we first need to become familiar with the four archetypes of organizations - each one ideally suited for survival and success in one of the four market environments.  It is to this task that we turn in the following chapter.

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Four Types of MarketsTransforming a Kingdom Mentality As little as two decades ago, a large number of American companies operated in kingdom environments.  Most of those environments are gone, transformed into  battlegrounds or jungles by the pressures of globalization, technology, increased efficiency, and the ever-increasing demands for improved quality and low prices. Read More Making the Right Match It has, I hope, become clear by now that in order to successfully market any product or service, a company must first identify which of the four market environments the product will be sold in.  Then it needs to adapt (or create) a marketing strategy to suit that environment. Read More Product Life Cycles Yet another crucial dynamic involves the life of each particular product or service.  Each starts out in the frontier as something new to the world and, thus, more or less proprietary.  As it becomes better known and more widely accepted, however, it turns slowly (and sometimes not so slowly) into a commodity.  In other words, it has gone through the crucible of business consolidations that lead to low margins and high volume.  A good example is personal computers.  These were essentially new products until the late 1980's, but are now commodity items with few differences between brands. Read More Product Evolution and Market Flow No one product or industry remains in a single market environment forever.  Like any other dynamic system, the market for any product or service is always in some flux.  Read More Market Dynamics Each of the four market environments requires its own organizational structure and set of behaviors. Furthermore, each must follow a unique strategic style if the company is to survive, succeed, and excel.  In short, what will work for Coca-Cola will spell disaster for amazon.com, and vice versa.  Read More Some Real World Examples One way to better understand these four market environments is to look at some companies that routinely do business in them. Read More Four Market Archetypes Each of today's organizations operates in one or more of these four distinctly different market environments: the kingdom, the battleground, the jungle, and the frontier. Read More