Blue Ocean Strategy Book Description

Description:

Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet, these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.

Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and 30 industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans"--untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves--which the authors call "value innovation"--create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.

W. Chan Kim is the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD. Renee Mauborgne is the INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Strategy and Management.

Book Review - Blue Ocean Strategy

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2004) : Reviewed by R. Lemuel Lasher

This is one small book that packs one big punch. At a mere 216 pages, including appendices, it’s a delightful and satisfying read. Here’s why.

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne have made a real contribution to advancing the thinking on business strategy, and they have done so with clear prose and an engaging style. They offer a set of practical frameworks and models that enables one to quickly grasp what appear to be intuitively obvious points, but are in reality profound insights and breakthrough contributions to business strategy literature.

By choosing as the title of their book a colorful metaphor not normally associated with strategy, the authors have given us a simple and memorable way of distinguishing their approach from more traditional ones.

A Blue Ocean is a market space that is created by identifying an unserved set of customers, then delivering to them a compelling new value proposition.

The first chapter, “Creating Blue Oceans,” introduces their thinking in a manner that is engaging and compelling. Their language of “creating” strategy, rather than the more traditional approaches to strategy development, sets the tone for the entire book. This is not just about strategy analysis and formulation; it is about using solid empirical data, rigorous analysis, and a strong dose of imagination.

According to the authors, a Blue Ocean is a market space that is created by identifying an unserved set of customers, then delivering to them a compelling new value proposition. This is done by reconfiguring what is on offer to better balance customer needs with the economic costs of doing so. This is as opposed to a Red Ocean, where the market is well defined and heavily populated by the competition. All parties in these markets are engaged in an intense competitive struggle for the same customers, with different and incremental yet easily comparable, value propositions.

The Blue Ocean is the unserved, unstructured demand that is all around us, if we could only see it. The Blue Ocean strategy is all about avoiding head-to-head competition. Because established markets in the developed world are saturated, head-to-head competition cannot bring attractive returns.

Summer Reading: Blue Ocean Strategy

Summer Reading: Blue Ocean Strategy

As many of us look forward to spending a little bit of quality downtime before Summer draws to a close, it seems quite a few of us will devote part of that time thinking about how to create new marketspace and eliminate the competition.

BusinessWeek has released its list of the 15 top-selling business books for the month of June, with Blue Ocean Strategy yet again making the cut. Blue Ocean Strategy has previously won accolades from the likes of Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal, and it continues to rank as one of the top-selling books in the General Investing category according to Amazon,

Since its initial publication in 2005, Blue Ocean Strategy the book is nearing two-million copies sold, existing in a record-breaking 39 languages worldwide.