Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #341 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Fort Worth Star Telegram, 14 February 2005
"Companies struggling to stay afloat in the market's...red oceans would do well to look into Blue Ocean Strategy."

American Way, March 2005
"Blue Ocean raises pertinent questions… and delivers valuable answers."

Customer Reviews

Any color as long as it is different
It's all about differentiation. Take a little issue and make it huge in the eyes of your market. A great read, starting on the first page.

Good Book
"There are only two revenue generators, marketing and innovation, all the other functions are expenses" Drucker. "The main goal of the company is to create customers" Drucker. This is what this book is about. Its about creating and providing value for customers through innovative means. Nine tenths of strategy lies in implementation. Take the parts that work for you and use it in your business and discard the rest. Blue ocean strategy is not a "one size" fits all strategy, nor is it a ten step guide to propel your company to a utopic position of competitive advantage. As a management consultant I frequently use some parts of the book to re-formulate strategic models for my clients. Jim Kayalar is a Certified Management Consultant with the Institute of Management Consultants USA (IMC-USA) with 20 plus years of experience in a myriad of industries. Jim Kayalar is the managing director and founder of Business Tune Up.

Faulty analysis - GIGO
I read this book with much anticipation after some of the highly rated comments and the hype surrounding the text.

Quite a disappointment the book turned out to be. At many points of the book it was quite obvious that the authors are using flawed analytics to explain events post-hoc. The so-called strategic mapping can be so easily manipulated to give one company the desired shape as opposed to a see-saw pattern just by the ordering of the criteria on the X-axis!!! Many of the supposedly strategic "blue ocean"-creating differentiation values by the companies are by no means intentional or deliberate as the authors would liken them to be. And what of the decline of these blue ocean companies in the book in recent times? Are they suddenly in a bloody ocean in such a short span of time from the publication of the book?

Read with a fistful of salt...