What is Blue Ocean Strategy ?


Blue Ocean Strategy challenges everything you thought you knew about strategy.

Business Strategy Review, UK

Blue Ocean Strategy is a mindset more than anything else.

More and more, organizations realize that it is not enough to know how to compete in the “bloody red ocean of competition” that most industries find themselves in today.  It is just as important to systematically innovate – but how?  Blue Ocean Strategy provides the frameworks and tools to help everyone think like an entrepreneur while challenging the status quo to develop fresh, innovative strategic alternatives.

The state-of-the-art approach to formulate strategies is the culmination of twenty years of research by INSEAD business school professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

Blue Ocean Strategy was published in 2005 and quickly became an international bestseller.  In the book, the authors outline several guiding principles and provide actionable frameworks to “create market space which makes the competition irrelevant.”

 

To find out more how Blue Ocean Strategy can help you in your organization, CONTACT US.

What is blue ocean leadership ?


 There are already plenty of tools that help us develop a better understanding of WHO WE ARE as a leader. But rarely do these resources focus on WHAT WE DO as leaders:  what activities actually help us execute our plans and increase our team’s engagement.  This is where BLUE OCEAN LEADERSHIP steps in.

As a component of leadership development, Blue Ocean Leadership helps us determine how we spend our time and resources as a leader, and how we can optimize this use of time and resources to achieve our goals and objectives.  As with BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, Blue Ocean Leadership uses a set of easy-to-apply tools and a validated process to ensure that the acts and activities that we spend time and resources on will help to convert disengaged employees, business partners or teammates, into engaged ones.

Executing the fresh solutions resulting from Blue Ocean Strategy thinking often necessitates an organizational rethink.  The principles of Blue Ocean Leadership are useful for any situation where a change in roles and responsibilities is called for:  this can be the result of forward planning, where the future may look quite different from today, of a change in strategy, where new competencies and approaches are required for implementation, or of an organizational restructure, where job roles and responsibilities are being redefined.

To find out more about how Blue Ocean Leadership can help you, CONTACT US

The insight for Blue Ocean Leadership is that leadership, in essence, can be thought of as a service that people in an organization either ‘buy’ or ‘don’t buy’…

W. Chan Kim and R. Mauborgne, “Blue Ocean Leadership” HBR May 2014 issue

How do you know if BLUE OCEAN is for you ?


  • Are you facing intense or increased competition?
  • Do you want to do things differently or do different things, but are at a loss for frameworks or tools to do so?
  • Do your sales reps increasingly argue they need to offer deeper price discounts to make sales?
  • Do you try to outperform your competitors on similar activities, only to find it is getting more and more expensive to gain market share?
  • Do you blame slow growth on the market?
  • Do you count principally on mergers and acquisitions to grow your company?
  • Does “challenging the status quo” happen altogether too infrequently in your organization?
  • Are external or internal events impacting your role, or your team’s role, in your organization?
  • Does your organization suffer from low employee engagement?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, then you may be swimming in a RED ocean.  Why not try looking at the BLUE ocean approach for some answers?