Do you want to create new demand with a new group of previous non-customers? Do you want to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space,
ripe for growth that makes competition irrelevant?
Like human beings, corporations do smart things and crazy things. There is no such thing as a permanently excellent company or industry. To improve the quality of our success, the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) have studied what we do that makes a positive difference and understood how to replicate it systematically. This is called making smart strategic moves or ‘value innovation’ - creating powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers, rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand. The strategic move that matters most is to create blue oceans.
Voted as the bestseller by the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, BOS examines a wide range of strategic moves across a host of industries. The framework addresses not only the analytical aspects behind the creation of BOS but also the allimportant human aspects of how to bring an organisation and its people on its journey, with a willingness to translate these ideas into action. An understanding of how to build trust and commitment, as well as an understanding of the importance of intellectual and emotional strengths are highlighted and brought to the core of this strategy.
Speaking recently at the London Business Forum, one of the authors, Renée Mauborgne, highlighted the six principles that every company can use to successfully formulate and execute blue ocean strategies.
The six principles show how to:
- reconstruct market boundaries;
- focus on the big picture;
- reach beyond existing demand;
- get the strategic sequence right;
- overcome organisational hurdles;
- build execution into strategy.
Rejecting traditional thinking about strategy, this landmark book charts a bold new path to winning in the future. Are you ready to boldly go where no man has gone before and be the Star Trek, Comic Relief, Google or Twitter of your industry?
Are you True Blue or Bloody Red?
Answer the questions below to determine how blue is your ocean?
- Is your company facing heightened competition from domestic and international rivals?
- Do your sales representatives increasingly argue that they need to offer deeper and deeper price discounts to make sales?
- Are you finding you need to advertise more to get noticed in the marketplace, yet the impact of each advertising pound spent is falling?
- Is your company focused more on cost cutting, quality control, and brand management at the expense of growth, innovation, and brand creation?
- Do you blame your slow growth on your market?
- Do you see outsourcing to low cost companies or countries as a principal prerequisite to regain competitiveness?
- Are mergers and acquisitions the principal means your company sees to grow?
- Is it easier to get funding to match a strategic move made by your competitor, than it is to get internal funding to support a strategic move that allows you to break away from the competition?
- Is commoditisation of offerings a frequent worry of your company?
- List your key competitive factors; now list your competition’s. Are they largely the same?
- If you answered yes to a majority of these questions, then your company is stuck in the red ocean.
Blue Ocean Strategy offers you a way to swim out of the red ocean filled with sharks. It presents a theory, tools, and frameworks to allow your company to break away from the competition and create a blue ocean of new market space.
Read what clients have to say:
After reading BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, you will never again see your competition in quite the same light. Kim and Mauborgne present a compelling case for pursuing strategy with a creative, not combative, approach. Their emphasis on value innovation and stakeholder engagement alone makes this book a must-read for both executives and students of business.
Carlos Ghosn, President and CEO, Renault & Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.
This is an extremely valuable book to read. It examines the experience of companies in areas as diverse as watches, wine, cement, computers, automobiles, and even the circus to shed new light on the development of
future strategies.
Nicolas G. Hayek, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Swatch Group
