My Review 5/5

Warning: The reader of this audio recording is flat..

Blue Oceans = Fertile grounds that aren’t bloodied by competition
Red Oceans = where companies compete with incremental innovations

Value Innovation = the strategy that propels organizations forward.

Reference to [book:Good to Great		 76865] this author contends it’s not enough to look at sectors or companies, you really should analyze strategy to discover the truly differentiating tactics. However, this being said the greatest danger to companies is success. As companies are successful they lose sight of the value delivered to the customer and focus on competitive bench marking.

Competition is NOT to be used for bench-marking (or rather, it should be, but not solely). Do the analysis and determine:

What can we eliminate, drastically reduce, add/create, raise to build a better product. These “four actions” can be used to create a blue ocean. See the success of Model T. These factors are combined with pricing across the market that captures the largest possible mass of buyers.

All great strategies have a divergent value curve, focused offering on commonalities of customers, and a compelling tagline.

The biggest mistake companies make is competing over market share of existing customers. Look for the three levels of non-customers. Those who engage minimally with the existing offerings, those who use a supplemental product, those who don’t consider your product to have value for them.

However, competing in the red ocean is usually where all the cash flow comes from. So regardless of how fair the blue ocean appears operations need to continue to compete today.

The truth is obscurity is the biggest problem. There are literal billions or at least hundreds of millions of customers not event targeted by strategic research for the taking. Ironically the thing utilized most for red-sea analysis is market research. But this really only mirrors back the expectations users have for existing offerings, and tends to reflect “more for less” type of incremental innovations.

When enacting new strategies do not violate the three E’s of justice. Engagement, Explanation, and Expectations. No matter how deep the organization they are humans who want to be heard and have feedback on the process. Violating a sense of justice will derail even the bests strategies. Voluntary cooperation trumps orders from the top every time.

Finally use tipping point (see [book:The Tipping Point		 2612] for deeper analysis) methods to enact change. Organizations do not need to apply leverage as a linear function. Identify the ‘kingpin’ thought leaders and spread the message to them. They will ensure the message is out.

Great book. I really enjoyed it and can directly use the lessons learned to building better products.

Date Read

Date Added

2017/02/09

Goodreads book information

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4899

Bookshelves: business

Author’s Note

Initial md Generated using https://github.com/jsr6720/goodreads-csv-to-md

W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, Renée Mauborgne Your Coach Digital 2006 (Audio CD)1

Significant revisions

tags: 2017, book, review, Kim, business

  • Apr 22nd, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
  • Feb 9th, 2017 Originally published on goodreads

EOF/Footnotes

  1. ISBN: =”1596590688” ↩