Blue Ocean Strategy

Winning by Not Competing: A Fresh Approach to Strategy

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 Renée 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 thirty 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.

• Part One: Blue Ocean Strategy
1. Creating Blue Oceans
2. Analytical Tools and Frameworks
• Part Two: Formulating Blue Ocean Strategy
1. Reconstruct Market Boundaries
2. Focus on the Big Picture, Not the Numbers
3. Reach Beyond Existing Demand
4. Get the Strategic Sequence Right
• Part Three: Executing Blue Ocean Strategy
1. Overcome Key Organizational Hurdles
2. Build Execution into Strategy
3. Conclusion: The Sustainability and Renewal of Blue Ocean Strategy
4. Appendix A: A Sketch of the Historical Pattern of Blue Ocean Creation
5. Appendix B: Value Innovation
6. Appendix C: The Market Dynamics of Value Innovation

Get real, these persons have discovered Business Development and decided that it is an revolutionary strategy model! I pity the morons to critics that find this a ground-breaking work (or even worse: the CEO's that agree!), as I can't believe anyone so dumb and clueless!

In defense of the authors, they have a very comprehensive set of models and checklists, that are worth the price of the book, if you can disregard the self-serving bullshit they manage to sprout.

They also tries to ride on the current trend to challenge everybody to not be satisfied with the current status quo, which is a key word of my generation of business leaders, and immediately gets our attention. Unfortunately, most of the challengers presents old ideas as new, and hope that we are to uneducated/inexperienced to notice.