A friend of mine (thanks Chris) pointed out a book called, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne as being one of the best business books out there. I immediately placed my Amazon.com order.
Since I was introduced to Blue Ocean Strategy, I’ve come across a lot of publicity for the book as it begins to pick up steam. Most recently there was this post, Blue Ocean Strategy At MCN, from the 800-CEO-Read Blog which pointed to the article, How to Make Your Competition Irrelevant – Meet the MasterMinds: W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, at MCNews (Management Consulting News).
I’m really itching to read Blue Ocean Strategy.
Here’s the editorial review from Publisher’s Weekly, which I grabbed from Amazon.com:
“Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike ‘red oceans,’ which are well explored and crowded with competitors, ‘blue oceans’ represent ‘untapped market space’ and the ‘opportunity for highly profitable growth.’ The only reason more big companies don’t set sail for them, they suggest, is that ‘the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies’ – i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. With this groundbreaking book, Kim and Mauborgne-both professors at France’s Insead, the second largest business school in the world, aim to repair that bias. Using dozens of examples-from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks-they present the tools and frameworks they’ve developed specifically for the task of analyzing blue oceans. They urge companies to ‘value innovation’ that focuses on ‘utility, price, and cost positions,’ to ‘create and capture new demand’ and to ‘focus on the big picture, not the numbers.’ And while their heavyweight analytical tools may be of real use only to serious strategy planners, their overall vision will inspire entrepreneurs of all stripes, and most of their ideas are presented in a direct, jargon-free manner. Theirs is not the typical business management book’s vague call to action; it is a precise, actionable plan for changing the way companies do business with one resounding piece of advice: swim for open waters.”
Goggles and nose plug are prepared to take the plunge.
This will definitely be a Montreal Business Book Club selection in the coming months.