Blue Ocean Strategy

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View books by W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne.

Eye-opening - Rated
This is a very well thought through and researched piece of work. It is a must -read for any CEO who wants his company to operate in a space different from the beaten track.

The book puts together a pack of simple yet powerful tools to conceptualize the new space, define it in detail, craft a profit strategy, and actualize its implementation.

The examples used are penetratively insightful, and liberal in number for the point(s) to be driven home.

Although primarily geared more for B2C businesses, the broad principles can be extrapolated for any type of business.

I was pleasantly intrigued to find that on the back of this book someone has actually created a service offering and started a boutique consulting firm. That is very impressive indeed.

Read the first half of the book - excellent. 2nd half- dull - Rated
I have been reading their reviews over the years and its good to see a summary book of their principles of value innovation. Their contextual examples really emphasise their thoughts well and for any practising marketeer, the strategic canvass section is an excellent tool in developing genuine new market space. By identifying key qualities in a market, or consumer need, and then reducing, eliminating, increasing or creating qualities, new market space is found. The end of the book is filler and offers no more insight than many other books on similar subjects - but then at least you only have to read half the book to gets it true value.

Don't waste your time reading this. - Rated
This is again one of these books trying to create a new management theory after the fact. There is nothing innovative explaining the obvious, and the authors clearly had trouble filling the pages, because it's very repetitive. Don't waste your money on this one.

"To strive, to seek, to find...." - Rated
This is an especially thought-provoking book which, as have so many others, evolved from an article published in the Harvard Business Review. According to Kim and Mauborgne, "[in italics] Blue ocean strategy [end italics] challenges companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant...This book not only challenges companies but also shows them how to achieve this. We first introduce a set of analytical tools and frameworks that show you how to systematically act on this challenge, and, second, we elaborate the principles that define and separate blue ocean strategy from competition-based strategic thought." There are six principles which are introduced and then discussed on pages 49, 82, 102, 117, 143, and 172, respectively.

Frankly, I was somewhat skeptical that this book could deliver on the promises made in its subtitle. In fact, the material provided by Kim and Mauborgne is essentially worthless unless and until decision-makers in a given organization accept the challenge, are guided and informed by the six principles, and effectively use the tools within appropriate frameworks. The responsibility is theirs, not Kim and Mauborgne's. To assist their efforts, Kim and Mauborgne focus on several exemplary companies which have dominated (if not rendered irrelevant) their competition by penetrating previously neglected market space. They include the Body Shop, Callaway Golf, Cirque du Soleil, Dell, NetJets, the SONY Walkman, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, the Swatch watch, and Yellow Tail wine.

Of greatest interest to me is Kim and Mauborgne's assertion that the innovations which enabled these companies to succeed with a Blue Ocean strategy did NOT depend upon a new technology. Rather, each company pursued a strategy which enabled it to free itself from industry boundaries. For Dell, that meant mass production of computers sold directly to consumers per each customer's specifications. Quite literally, each sale is "customized." For Callaway, creating an enlarged sweet spot to increase the frequency of solid contact for new or infrequent golfers just as, years ago, the enlarged Head racquet did so for new or infrequent tennis players. For Starbucks, creating a congenial environment within which to socialize, go online, or read while consuming coffee. All of these Blue Ocean strategies created new or much greater value for customers. Their emphasis is on the quality of experience, not on the benefits of a new technology.

According to Kim and Mauborgne, their research indicates that "the strategic move, and not the company or the industry, is the right unit of analysis for explaining the creation of blue oceans and sustained high performance. A strategic move is the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering." The cornerstone of a Blue Ocean strategy is value innovation which occurs "only when companies align innovation with utility, price, and cost positions. If they fail to anchor innovation with value in this way, technology innovators and market pioneers often lay the eggs that other companies hatch." For Kim and Mauborgne, value innovation is about strategy that embraces the entire system of a company's activities. It requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a "leap" in value for both buyers and themselves. Kim and Mauborgne explain HOW to create uncontested market space wherein competition is essentially irrelevant.

To paraphrase Henry Ford, whether decision-makers think they can or think they can't do that, they're right.

Value Innovation - strategy book of the year 2005? - Rated
The authors have published many articles over the last decade on Value Innovation. This is their first book. It summarizes their extensive knowledge on out-of-the-box strategic thinking. I'm looking forward to reading it. This review is based on their article in Harvard Business Review, Oct 2004, on "Blue Ocean Strategy".

What is a BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY? The authors explain it by comparing it to a red ocean strategy (traditional strategic thinking):
1. DO NOT compete in existing market space. INSTEAD you should create uncontested market space.
2. DO NOT beat the competition. INSTEAD you should make the competition irrelevant.
3. DO NOT exploit existing demand. INSTEAD you should create and capture new demand.
4. DO NOT make the value/cost trade-off. INSTEAD you should break the value/cost trade-off.
5. DO NOT align the whole system of a company's activities with its strategic choice of differentiation or low cost. INSTEAD you should align the whole system of a company's activities in pursuit of both differentiation and low cost.

A red ocean strategy is based on traditional strategic thinking - e.g. Harvard's strategy guru Michael Porter - and is what the authors believe you should not do.

A blue ocean is created in the region where a company's actions favourably affect both its cost structure and it value proposition to buyers. Cost savings are made from eliminating and reducing the factors an industry competes on. Buyer value is lifted by raising and creating elements the industry has never offered. Over time, costs are reduced further as scale economies kick in, due to the high sales volumes that superior value generates.

There are two ways to create blue oceans. In a few cases, firms can give rise to completely new industries, as eBay did with the online auction industry. But in most cases, a blue ocean is created from within a red ocean when a company alters the boundaries of an existing industry.

The authors have studied more than 150 blue ocean creations in over 30 industries. Examples include:
- Japanese fuel-efficient autos (mid-70s) and Chrysler minivan (1984)
- Apple personal computer (1978) and Dell's built-to-order computers (mid-1990s).

The INSEAD professors Kim and Mauborgne have written regularly on the subject of Value Innovation since 1997 in Harvard Business Review. Being a business development manager, their thought leadership on strategic innovation has inspired me tremendously over the years. Their articles have been standard texts for many MBA students for some time (e.g. "Value Innovation", "Creating New Market Space", "Charting your Company's Future"). I expect their first book to be just as dominant in any strategy library as Michael Porter's books (the guru behind the classic red ocean strategies).

The rating is based on their articles so far.

Peter Leerskov,
M.Sc. in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business