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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Blue Ocean Shift summary
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Beyond Competing – Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth
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4.4 (156 ratings)
24 mins
10 key ideas
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What is Blue Ocean Shift about?
Blue Ocean Shift (2017) is a step-by-step guide to moving past competition in an overcrowded industry. These blinks, based on decades of the authors’ practical experience, explain why you should endeavor to make competition obsolete and how you can open up whole new worlds of opportunity.
About the Author
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne are professors of strategy at INSEAD and co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. They co-wrote the 2004 international bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy. In addition to receiving numerous awards, they were also listed by Thinkers50 among the top three management gurus in the world.
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Key idea 1 of 10
Transcend competition with a blue ocean shift.
When choosing a business strategy, it’s important to decide which direction you want it to take, and most people assume your choices are limited to two: the value-driven path, along which your business expands through outstanding quality and service, and the low-cost strategy, through which your business endeavors to offer the best price among all its competitors.
Those two options are all well and good, but there’s a third strategy that can do much more. It’s called the blue ocean shift. The blue ocean shift is about taking your business beyond competition into markets that are entirely untouched.
Just take the example of Groupe SEB, a well-established French maker of small appliances like those that make french fries. One of the basic assumptions in this industry was that making french fries involved deep frying and using a great deal of oil. Nobody ever thought to challenge this idea, even though cooking in liters of oil is expensive, dangerous, messy and, of course, unhealthy.
But in 2006, Groupe SEB came out with the ActiFry, introducing a whole new way of making french fries that requires no frying and employs just a tablespoon of oil. ActiFry brought in new customers, opened up a brand-new market and positioned Groupe SEB as a global leader.
In other words, the essence of a blue ocean shift is moving from a market that’s pervaded by fierce competition, a so-called red ocean, into a blue ocean, a market that’s wide open and full of opportunity. Such a move might seem like a magic trick, but there’s a straightforward method behind it that abides by three key components.
First, you need a new blue ocean perspective that expands the horizon of your thinking; second, you need humanness along the way to motivate people into helping you make the shift of perspective; and third, you have to have the market-creating tools to transform that perspective into an attractive product.
However, these concepts are all very abstract. In the following blinks, you’ll learn all the nitty-gritty details of how this process works and how you can put it into action.
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Who should read Blue Ocean Shift
- Entrepreneurs, managers, CEOs and business leaders
- Small business owners
- Business scholars and theorists of competition and market strategy
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