Blue Ocean Strategy or Leading Change

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

Author: W Chan Kim

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 Renйe 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.

W. Chan Kim is the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD. Renйe Mauborgne is the INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Strategy and Management.

Author Bio:

W. Chan Kim is the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD. Renйe Mauborgne is the INSEAD Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Strategy and Management.

Table of Contents:

1	Creating blue oceans	3
2	Analytical tools and frameworks	23
3	Reconstruct market boundaries	47
4	Focus on the big picture, not the numbers	81
5	Reach beyond existing demand	101
6	Get the strategic sequence right	117
7	Overcome key organizational hurdles	147
8	Build execution into strategy	171
9	Conclusion : the sustainability and renewal of blue ocean strategy	185

Book review: Running in Literature or Monochrome Days

Leading Change

Author: John P Kotter

John Kotter, the world's foremost expert on business leadership, distills twenty-five years of experience into Leading Change. A must-have for any organization, this visionary and very personal audiobook is at once inspiring, clear-headed, and filled with important implications for the future.
 
The pressures on organizations to change will only increase over the next decades. Yet the methods managers have used to strengthen their companies—total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds—routinely fall short. In Leading Change, Kotter identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people—good people—often derail. Emphasizing again and again the critical need for leadership to make change happen, Leading Change provides unprecedented access to our generation's business master and a positive role model for leaders to emulate.
 

Cause/Effect Journal - Doug Gale

The book Leading Change, by John P. Kotter, is a "must read" for any CIO or senior manager contemplating institutional change.

Publishers Weekly

Harvard Business School professor Kotter (A Force for Change) breaks from the mold of M.B.A. jargon-filled texts to produce a truly accessible, clear and visionary guide to the business world's buzzword for the late '90schange. In this excellent business manual, Kotter emphasizes a comprehensive eight-step framework that can be followed by executives at all levels. Kotter advises those who would implement change to foster a sense of urgency within the organization. "A higher rate of urgency does not imply everpresent panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent." Twenty-first century business change must overcome overmanaged and underled cultures. "Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders." Kotter also identifies pitfalls to be avoided, like "big egos and snakes" or personalities that can undermine a successful change effort. Kotter convincingly argues for the promotion and recognition of teams rather than individuals. He aptly concludes with an emphasis on lifelong learning. "In an ever changing world, you never learn it all, even if you keep growing into your '90s." Leading Change is a useful tool for everyone from business students preparing to enter the work force to middle and senior executives faced with the widespread transformation in the corporate world. 60,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; dual main selection of the Newbridge Book Club Executive Program; 20-city radio satellite tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal

After trying an endless array of quick fixes and other panaceas, executives struggling to stay in business in a rapidly changing world are finding it necessary to consider more fundamental reasons for their lack of success. Kotter (The New Rules: A Force for Change, Free Pr., 1995) now offers a practical approach to an organized means of leading, not managing, change. He presents an eight-stage process of change with highly useful examples that show how to go about implementing it. Based on experience with numerous companies, his sound advice gets directly at reasons that organizations fail to change, reasons that concern primarily the leader. This is a solid, substantive work that goes beyond the clichs and the consultant-of-the-month's express down yet another dead-end street. With its clear demonstration of the hard work necessary to lead change, this important work stands with Michael Hammer's latest, Beyond Reengineering (see review above). Highly recommended.Dale F. Farris, Groves, Tex.

What People Are Saying

William C. Finnie
The best work I have seen on strategy implementation.