Blue Ocean Strategy: Tipping Point Leadership in Action

Blue Ocean Strategy: Tipping Point Leadership in Action

Continuing with our Blue Ocean Strategy Basics series, over the course of the next four weeks we will continue to highlight examples of Tipping Point Leadership and the Four Organizational Hurdles to Strategy Execution. Once an overview of each example or ‘hurdle’ is published, it is made accessible through the Blue Ocean Strategy Basics archive of this site. For the next entry in our series on Tipping Point Leadership and the Four Organizational Hurdles to Strategy Execution, we turn to pages 148 – 149 of the book Blue Ocean Strategy (co-authored by Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne).

Blue Ocean Strategy: Tipping Point Leadership in Action

Consider the New York City Police Department (NYPD), which executed a blue ocean strategy in the 1990s in the public sector. When Bill Bratton was appointed police commissioner of New York City in February 1994, the odds were stacked against him to an extent few executives ever face. In the early 1990s, New York City was veering toward anarchy. Murders were at an all-time high. Muggings, Mafia hits, vigilantes, and armed robberies filled the daily headlines. New Yorkers were under siege. But Bratton’s budget was frozen….

yet in less than two years and without an increase in his budget, Bratton turned New York City into the safest large city in the United States. He broke out of the red ocean with a blue ocean policing strategy that revolutionized U.S. policing as it was then known. Between 1994 and 1996, the organization won as “profits” jumped: Felony crime fell 39 percent, murders 50 percent, and theft 35 percent. “Customers” won: Gallup polls reported that public confidence in the NYPD leaped from 37 percent to 73 percent. And employees won: Internal surveys showed job satisfaction in the NYPD reaching an all-time high. As one patrolman put it, “We would have marched to hell and back for that guy.” Perhaps most impressively, the changes have outlasted its leader, implying a fundamental shift in the organizational culture and strategy of the NYPD. Even after Bratton’s departure in 1996, crime rates have continued to fall.

Few corporate leaders face organizational hurdles as steep as Bratton did in executing a break from the status quo. And still fewer are able to orchestrate the type of performance leap that Bratton achieved under any organizational conditions, let alone those as stringent as he encountered. Even Jack Welch needed some ten years and tens of millions of dollars of restructuring and training to turn GE into a powerhouse.

Moreover, defying conventional wisdom, Bratton achieved these breakthrough results in record time with scarce resources while lifting employee morale, creating a win-win for all involved. Nor was this Bratton’s first strategic reversal. It was his fifth, with each of the others also achieved despite his facing all four hurdles that managers consistently claim limit their ability to execute blue ocean strategy: the cognitive hurdle that blinds employees from seeing that radical change is necessary; the resource hurdle that is endemic in firms; the motivational hurdle that discourages and demoralizes staff; and the political hurdle of internal and external resistance to change.