Blue Ocean Classics

by W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne

The collection you need to create more blue oceans.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne changed the field of strategy and the language of business with their pathbreaking "blue ocean strategy," a model for creating uncontested markets that unlock new demand and new opportunities for growth. This book brings together three of their classic blue ocean strategy articles, all first published in Harvard Business Review.

"Blue Ocean Strategy" highlights the distinct differences between market-competing (red ocean) and market-creating (blue ocean) strategy and what it takes to create the new markets of tomorrow.

In "Red Ocean Traps," Kim and Mauborgne reveal the faulty assumptions that keep managers tethered to existing overcrowded markets (red oceans).

"Blue Ocean Leadership" applies the concepts and analytic frameworks of blue ocean strategy to an innovative leadership approach that releases employees' untapped talent and energy while conserving their most precious resource--time.

This collection is the ideal start, or refresher, for creating more blue oceans.

Genres: Business

144 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 16, 2019

About the author

W. Chan Kim is the Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute and a Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD. His book Blue Ocean Strategy, co-authored with Renée Mauborgne, has sold 3.6 million copies and is recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written. It is being published in a record-breaking 44 languages and is a bestseller across five continents.
Kim is ranked in the top 3 management gurus in the world in the Thinkers50 listing of the World’s Top Management Gurus. He was selected for the 2011 Leadership Hall of Fame by Fast Company magazine and was named among the world's top 5 best business school professors by MBA Rankings. He also received the Nobels Colloquia Prize for Leadership on Business and Economic Thinking. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and an advisory member for the European Union. He also serves as an advisor to several countries.

Reviews

[cypher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is giving an overview, with examples, of the theory "blue ocean strategy”, that W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne produced about a decade ago, theory around behaviours that already exist in the market, intuitively or mindfully, by singling them out and organising the principles.
"Blue Ocean Classics” is a collection, which includes “Blue Ocean Strategy” (condensed), “Red Ocean Traps”, “Blue Ocean Leadership”. This is a review for the entire collection.

Concepts
Red oceans: the entire market space, which turns bloody red because of the competition.

Blue oceans: the unknown market space, where there is no competition currently, here there is opportunity for growth that is rapid and ample. (example: eBay creating a new online auction industry)
Blue oceans are often formed from within red oceans, when a company innovates something in the industry. In time, blue oceans can turn red.
With more blue oceans, some red oceans turn blue.

Good open questions:
Should a new company jump into a red ocean?
What strategies exist around protecting blue oceans?

According to the research, blue oceans are often in: transport to work, work/productivity, after-work entertainment. A company brand can benefit for decades from blue ocean creation.
Successful starting strategies: differentiation and low cost combined, benchmarked against other players.

“Red Ocean Traps” (article):
managers trained with theories of the red oceans environment, often get stuck thinking in a blue ocean mindset, since it is comfortable following already established, common, less innovative principles. This will keep the company operating in red oceans.
Common principles: benchmarking against competition only, having a customer lead business, doing just customer lead development and research, expecting R&D investment to lead to new market creation instead of user research investment, new market are made my making old markets obsolete (destructive and disruptive strategies can reach strong residence), focusing on low cost solely (can lead to quality sacrifice), focusing on differentiation and low cost on specific axis in isolation (can lead to making the business a competitor).
(Example of success: Amazon launching Kindle - Kindle Suite and breaking the market by refusing to follow customer feedback around bigger laptop/mobile screens for reading)

“Blue Ocean Leadership” (article):
Here is where the book and I disagree a bit, I was not aware that modern leadership practices were theorised or conceptually invented by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. The type of leadership described was already common, for example in big tech companies, before the book was first published, but yes, linking successful leadership tactics with the Blue Ocean Strategy makes sense to make any attempt more efficient at putting a company on the Blue Ocean Strategy track. The book is proposing some specific techniques to investigate leadership performance that are interesting to consider.
Main concepts to apply: authentic/empathetic leadership, flexibility, removal of redundant leadership layers (flattening the org, lean company org), employee/customer feedback driven leadership, distributed leadership, workshop driven engagement with leadership (brainstorming), individual engagement with reports (1:1 culture), connecting cross-layer, building trust, transparency.

Overall, I don’t regret spending time on this book. It was informative, and the blue-red ocean concept brought on a new perspective on the market.
Unfortunately, I believe it will be difficult to break the patterns of Red Oceans, especially since the current market has more and more well established mastodon-companies, which will only grow more, covering more areas of influence, and they aligned themselves in an almost-permanent competition with each other. A potential way to look at it will be to big companies creating small pools of Blue Oceans, here and there, temporarily, until the other giants pick up on it and offer an alternative.

[Dr. Tathagat Varma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the blue ocean strategy piece, but when the same good idea starts to get slapped at other ideas without any real basis, that becomes a bit too much! The past of blue ocean leadership is just like that. But rest of the stuff is important and interesting.

[Abby Epplett · Rating 3 out of 5]

A vague concept repeated frequently throughout the short book using stories that I have heard elsewhere.