About half way through. Not a book you can't put down but good airplane reading. Makes you think about different strategies so worth it.

The theories and stories in this book should be read by anyone currently a part of running a business. Essentially, a blue ocean is a new market that reaches out to a population not contemplated by the current companies in an existing market. The authors warn companies to get out of the red oceans where daily and bloody battles for market share and new customers occur each day and encourages readers to create a new market, where untapped customers will be drawn in and competition becomes irrelevant because there are no more players in the game. This means changing the status quo, something that is hardly easy, but is critical in remaining competitive in today's global market. This book is a quick read and the ideas and strategies are worth understanding and applying.

Good Book and a must read for anyone starting a Business or a new venture.

I am very pleased with my order. The book was in excellent condition and was swiftly delivered.

Thanks!

The authors use the ocean metaphor to differentiate between the typical
strategic approach and the one that they advocate. The bloody red ocean is where the vast majority of companies thrash and battle furiously with their competition, adding incremental improvements to differentiate their
products/services. The blue ocean, as the subtitle suggests, describes an
uncontested market space that makes competition irrelevant. It is achieved through value-innovation - creating a leap in buyer value and reducing cost at the same time.

A variety of ways to create blue oceans are described in the book to include, reconstructing your market boundaries and reaching beyond existing demand. The authors provide easy-to-understand concepts and tools for taking your own organization through a strategic planning exercise.

The authors also acknowledge that even if you develop the most wonderful
strategy, implementing it can be quite difficult, so they provide pointers for helping bring about organizational change.

It is acknowledged that all blue oceans eventually become red. Tips are
provided to help determine the right time to start value innovating again, vs. riding out the blue ocean.

This is an important book. It's a value-innovation in its own right for assisting with strategic development and execution

Nick McCormick, Author, Lead Well and Prosper: 15 Successful Strategies for Becoming a Good Manager

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.

"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.

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...

This book is excellent for people who are specialized on Marketing, easy to apply on real life because it has a lot of real life examples.

I remember being blown away by the articles in HBR that this book was based on. The strategy canvas is a fantastic tool - very simple, very visual and very powerful, so too is their "eliminate-reduce-raise-create" grid.

The book doesn't add much of substance to the articles - but the stories are useful illustrations and it is easy to read - also it's easier to keep the book on your shelf than tatty old photo-copies of an article.

Another INSEAD professor has now taken this work further, in my opinion. The Momentum Effect: How to Ignite Exceptional Growth (which has been endorsed by Kim and Marborgne) calls creating this sort of uncontested market space "origination strategy" - ie originating new and different value for customers. The two make perfect partners. Both are excellent books.

Interesting read. Good to Great a little easier to apply in my experience. Look out for red oceans - they are everywhere!

Is it possible to find a book to be boring and interesting at the same time?
* In Blue Ocean Strategy, some sections of the book I found myself re-reading twice just to ensure I fully understood the author's intent.
* Other parts, I entirely skipped over due to extreme boredom.
* And in other sections, I fully embraced the content and couldn't get enough!
This very complex, hard-hitting, detailed book is perfect for business junkies who want to learn innovative strategic methods for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of their business operations. If you are ready to THINK and ACT outside the box and take your business to another level, by differentiating your products and services and separating yourself from the competition, then this book is for you.

"Blue Ocean" is a metaphor of uncontested market space that is reached by reconstructing market boundaries. The authors convincingly show how this impacts profit and growth, and why we should focus analysis on strategic moves as opposed to strategic companies.

Central to the theory is the "strategy canvas", in which you rate a company on a set of industry factors. You than tweak these to find uncontested market space. This demands some creativity, but basically you decide for each factor whether it will be reduced, eliminated, created, or raised.

There is a good set of convincing cases to support the point. By seeing how companies invented and exploited blue oceans you get an intuitive feel for potential in a market.

To quickly tell the quality of this book, note that the authors immediately discredit themselves by including two key words in their subtitle: "uncontested" and "irrelevant". Social science research does not produce findings that justify such claims, so the authors are obviously extrapolating beyond any research they conducted and try to dupe non-academic popular book readers into thinking their research is solid. While you might think that the publisher created such subtitle against the authors will, you will actually find that the authors are deeply committed to their "blue ocean" ideology by using these words throughout the book.

The authors' assertion that blue ocean strategy (strategy that creates previously non-existent products or services that the customers actually want) delivers higher profits is simply not true. First of all, the authors are only studying successful businesses employing blue ocean strategy. For all we know, other businesses that used blue ocean strategy that the authors did not study failed, proving that blue ocean strategy had nothing to do with success of those businesses that the authors did study. Second of all, the authors miss the concept of "expected value". Competing in the red oceans (existing products that are commonplace) allows big companies to compute probability of success relatively easily, partly because the products' success and demand is already clearly observable in the marketplace. Therefore, contrary to the authors' claim, the red oceans have a big purpose that big companies should not ignore. Second of all, the authors claim that blue ocean products deliver higher profits is not substantiated. In many cases, new revolutionary products come with a higher cost of marketing, because the consumers may be confused by not being able to compare the new product against their existing choice set. However, the authors do not address this higher cost of "blue ocean strategies". Additionally, because blue ocean products are newer than existing "red ocean products", they probably have a higher rate of failure. Thus, while the maximum return from a "blue ocean strategy" might theoretically be higher vs. "red ocean strategy", on average, given higher failure rate and higher marketing costs, the EXPECTED VALUE to the organization from either blue or red ocean strategy might actually be the same.

If you want an unbiased, evidence-based overview of marketing strategy, you should buy Dr.Chernev's Strategic Marketing Analysis instead of this book.

What can I say that has not been said about this book? Here is a more personal appreciation.

This is the first book I've read about branding and differentiation. The author is full of common sense but the
weird thing as that this type of common sense is not so common in business. Obviously this is not a step by
step guide to building a great business. There is no such thing. What you do get is a nice framework
to position your idea and see how you compare within your extended competitive landscape. Applying this
framework to your own idea might require more intuition than you think (otherwise creating the next best thing would be too simple) but the author uses many case studies as examples of how to use the framework.
Of course, he has the benefit of hindsight but that's no reason to dismiss the ideas. Great book and fun to read.

This book provides 'out of the box' thinking for any executives struggling with competition and being perceived as a 'commodity' in their marketplace. Innovating your value and differentiating yourself to the portion of the market that the masses of competitors are not servicing is one path to success. The examples of Cirque du Soleil, Yellow Tail Wines and NetJets shows how creative strategy can move you out of the 'Red Ocean' (competitive blood bath) and into the 'Blue Ocean' (new market realm) to ultimately make the competition irrelevant.

I highly recommend this book to my clients that feel like they are stuck in a 'commodity play'. Value Innovate. Don't be a commodity!

Kevin A. McCann
President & CEO
Executive Strategy Group, LLC
http://www.executivestrategygroup.com

"Value Defined, Value Delivered" (tm)

Aristotle tells in his Poetics about the figures of speech that can be used by poets and orators, then he adds: "It is a great thing to make a fitting use of each of one of these devices, but the greatest thing of all is being a master of metaphors. This alone can be gotten from no one else, and is the sign of born talent, since to use metaphor well is to have a sense for likeness."

Conversely, to use a bad metaphor is a sure sign of poor taste. And to use it repeatedly and in an incoherent manner not only demonstrates lack of poetical sense, but also denotes poor reasoning.

In their essay, Kim and Mauborgne use the evocative powers of the ocean to help corporate executives craft innovative business strategies. This is altogether fitting: the sea is the mirror of man's soul, and navigating on uncharted waters has always been a powerful metaphor of human endeavor. Management discourse is replete with terms borrowed from navigation, from being at the helm to toiling in the hold.

Indeed, as argued by the authors, corporate strategy would gain from distancing itself from the vocabulary of war-making and from using bellicose metaphors, and should instead develop the analogy with the art of seafaring. Forget Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, welcome to Bougainville and Cook. Captains of industry are more like masters and commanders of vessels riding with the tide of consumers' demand than generals engaged in a battle with the competition.

The Blue Ocean therefore provides a good catch phrase for a spirit of adventure, endless possibilities, and the thrill of discovery. It is what every entrepreneur should aspire. The Red Ocean, in turn, is more difficult to construe. I have been reminded of the "wine-dark sea" of Homer, or of the River Tiber foaming with blood as in Virgil. The image here is menacing and frightening, and those waters should be avoided by all business leaders.

Provided, of course, the seagoing vessel is the object of comparison for a business enterprise. This is not very clear in the text. The authors sometimes refer to swimming, implying that the entrepreneur is compared to a large fish, maybe a shark. Indeed, only sharks competing for a bloody prey can turn the ocean into red. But if one has to espouse the form and character of a shark, on has to behave like one. For sharks, swimming in red oceans is much better than patrolling blue ones. Blood is what they are after, and therefore they love to cruise bloody waters.

The metaphor gets even more illogical. The authors write about creating one's blue ocean within a red ocean, they give advise on how to unlock an ocean, or they refer to the cornerstone (sic) of a blue ocean strategy. Again if you are a shark, you can create your pool of bloody water within an ocean of blue, but the reverse is nonsensical. Creating an ocean defies common sense and even artistic license. Mixing blue and red will only give you purple. And cornerstones put into any pool of water will sink to the bottom.

Maybe I am trying to read too much into this metaphor. Like a simple melody or the silly lyrics of a song, its purpose is to stick to the mind and to become a self-evident reference. Blue and red oceans are sticky labels: even when you would like to ignore them, you cannot help but using them when you discuss their content. The reason behind this stickiness is self-reference: precisely because the image is the message, you cannot go beyond the metaphor to reach a core meaning. There is nothing beyond the call to imagination.

I will not say this book is the defininate guide to success but does provide a new way of looking at the market, in particular an alternative look on the market.

By not only focussing on cost reduction, but more on getting more people interested in your product, this book gives some eye openers.

Even if it's not practical for you, the book is easy and entertaining to read and therefore no waste of time.

Today, competition between companies is rampant and bloody, especially with the new emerging economies such as China and India. According to the authors, our industries have become overcrowded, creating a "red ocean" of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. The authors argue that while most companies compete within such red oceans, this strategy is increasingly unlikely to create profitable growth in the future. The authors argue that tomorrow's leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating "blue oceans" of uncontested market space ripe for growth. Such strategic moves, according to the authors, render rivals obsolete and unleash new demand. The authors say, "These ideas are not for those whose ambition in life is to get by or merely to survive." (ix). The ideas in this book are meant to make a difference, and to create a company that builds a future where customers, employees, shareholders, and society win. As a side note, more than one million copies of this book were sold in the first year!

The metaphor of red and blue oceans is used to describe the market universe. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today--the known market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, and cutthroat competition turns the red ocean bloody. Hence the term `red oceans'.

Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today--the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored.

This book challenges companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant. Instead of dividing up existing--and often shrinking--demand and benchmarking competitors, blue ocean strategy is about growing demand and breaking away from the competition. The authors say, "No company--large or small, incumbent or new entrant--can afford to be a riverboat gambler. And no company should." (x).

One such company that broke away from the competition is `Cirque du Soleil' (French for `Circus of the Sun). This Canadian company, founded in 1984 by Guy Laliberté, has forever changed the world of Circus entertainment. Instead of competing in a declining industry, with Circus profits at an all time low due to a decline in attendance and increase in overheads, Laliberté created a whole new industry in circus entertainment. The focus was no longer on animal shows, which were expensive to perform and were opposed by Animal Rights movements, but on spectacular audiovisual performances from artists from around the world. You'll have to attend a show to real know what `Cirque du Soleil' is all about. Each show is a synthesis of circus styles from around the world and has its own central theme and storyline which brings the audience into the performance by having no curtains and continuous live music.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s Cirque expanded rapidly and went from one show with 73 employees in 1984 to currently 3,500 employees from over 40 countries. `Cirque du Soleil' tours every continent and has an estimated annual revenue exceeding US$600 million. The multiple permanent Las Vegas shows alone play to more than 9,000 people a night--5% of the city's visitors--adding to the 70+ million people who have experienced `Cirque du Soleil.'

Laliberté succeeded in breaking away from the competition and creating a new demand: stunning and magical performances with a storyline from cultures spanning the globe! A visit to 'Cirque' is a journey through time and space.

`Cirque du Soleil' is just one example (and the first) the authors cite. Their research is based on more than fifteen years of research on 150 strategic moves by companies in thirty industries and spanning more than a hundred years. The authors also published a series of `Harvard Business Review' articles. Their research led them to create strategies to making the competition irrelevant.

In this book, you will be introduced to the six principles that every company can use to successfully formulate and execute blue oceans. You will learn how to reconstruct market boundaries, focus on the big picture, reach beyond existing demand, get the strategic sequence right, overcome organizational hurdles, and build execution into strategy. Basically, these strategies will chart "a bold new path to winning the future."

The authors say that there are no permanently excellent companies, just as there are no permanently excellent industries. A perfect example is Polaroid. A giant once; gone today. The industry itself has changed and evolved, with the advent of digital photography. The companies that created a new demand in this industry are the ones that survived.

This book addresses a fundamental requirement of all business owners: In order to succeed, you must swim into uncharted waters and create a unique identity. Now that we know we're dealing with the concept of branding, there are five books I've read prior to Blue Ocean Strategy:

Marketing Warfare: 20th Anniversary Edition

This book introduced the military concept of "flanking" (staking your claim in an uncontested area) over 20 years ago.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

More on branding from Ries & Trout, with an additional 11 "laws" specifically targeted toward Internet branding.

The Brand Gap: Expanded Edition

"Five disciplines to help companies bridge the gap between brand strategy and brand execution"

Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands

As in "When your competitors, 'ZIG', you must 'ZAG'"...as the back-cover copy states, it's a book on how to "out-position, out-maneuver, and out-design the competition."

The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create It, Build it, and Use It to Maximum Effect

A tough, no-nonsense book from a business writer who witnessed the transition of "Silicon Valley" from orchards to semiconductor firms. He also summarizes Ries & Trout's "flanking" principles.

So the question is "After reading these books, what new insights did I gain from Blue Ocean Strategy?" The answer? Not many.

The first problem I have with the book is the writing style of the authors. It's just a personal preference. I prefer the more direct, hard-hitting styles of the authors I've listed above. I found myself two or three pages into selected chapters and thinking "Are you EVER going to get to the POINT?"

The second problem is that there seems to be an attempt to build a "working model" or "paradigm" and what I find myself with is a grad student term paper that doesn't really climb into the real-world business trenches with me.

YES, Cirque du Soleil makes for an interesting case study. But I'm more interested in the hard-core, nitty gritty realities of stepping out onto the battlefield and making my business stand out.

I strongly urge anyone considering the purchase of this book to either thumb through it in your local bookstore or head on over to Google Books and read the available excerpts. The writers will either win you over or they won't. I gave the book three stars for the importance of its subject matter and docked it two stars for the writing style of the authors.

I spotted this book in the Harvard Business Review magazine a couple months ago. I took it out of my local library and after the first chapter stopped reading it returned it and immediately bought a copy. This is a book that requires a notepad, two or more highlighters, and those postit flags to mark the important things to remember.
I literally couldn't put it down. I have used their Strategy Canvas to help our company work on developing a strategic plan for an entire new product offering.
Incredible look at strategy, a must read for business owners, managers and certainly Strategic Planners.

A must read book for any one who intend to start a business or who want to enhance their existing one. It clearly lays down the protocol to identify the untapped markets. Brilliant presentation.

Regards,
Arun.

Blue Ocean Strategy approaches business from a different perspective. By properly positioning your business you can eliminate the competition. In a world where businesses battle for market share Blue Ocean Strategy is a must read. Push Button Investing in Real Estate

Ron Draluck, author of Push button Investing in Real Estate

Yes, it'd be useful if replication of past successes could ensure a glorious future. However, accomplished practioners know that this isn't the case! The authors have selected specific examples that serve their thesis and have repurposed valuable but somewhat dated concepts developed by Michael Porter and the Boston Consulting Group. Moreover, the Strategic Grid Technique, while a useful tool, seems a pale copy of QDF. In my opinion, there is neither academic breakthrough nor deep critical thinking here!

Outstanding book. For those who has an entrepeneurship mind set can not stay without reading this book.
Blue Ocean is the name of the game from now on.

It is easy to get a quick overview and understanding of the content in this book and it gives you tools to use right away. Exciting ideas and worth while to think about.

The book forced me to rethink the way I normally would look at business developments for my companies: either value based or feature based. The idea of a creating new space in a crowded market and making a leap in growth through the blue ocean strategy stirred up my thinking juices. Personally, I don't like how to books with "three simple steps" This book was great; a must read.

1. This is NOT a marketing book
2. There is no such thing as a fail safe strategy
3. This is a tool and is only as good as the user
4. Applicable in different situations
5. Good companion to Competitive Strategy written in the 80's by Mike Porter which is THE industry book
6. The book is NOT a pioneer and is NOT proported to be. It is a study in those companies who seemed to have created new markets such as Cirque De Soleil. The authors did NOT set out to create a new "theory" and then retroactively "fit" companies but rather study an emerging pheonom. and try to locate patterns.

I think that pretty much covers all the gripes of the previous entries. I first came across this book in a competitive strategy class in a business organizational change degree. It is an excellent text and gives another viewpoint to the old study of competitive strategy. I have used the strategy canvas tool located in chapter two AS A TOOL to assist me in both departmental and industry situations to locate existing patterns of competition.

Worth the money.
But then, I am just a "mere" academic (albeit with many years of industry experience) so if you truly do not like the book I suggest returning it. :)

The greatest struggle for most business people is to come up with a truly original and valuable idea. Close behind that is how to get employees to work together. This book makes me want to cry, because it actually, simply, lays out how to do both. Beautiful.

I bought this book. Their identifications are valid enough. Great companies have always created uncontested market space while making their competitors irrelevant. This is not in dispute. However...

The authors Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne are just mere academics. And what is annoying is that they haven't battle tested their Blue Ocean model from hard knocks in the trenches business wars to find out what works and what doesn't for themselves! Again, this is what I find annoying with academics. They say a lot but never prove it themselves! Remember Merton & Scholes and LTCM?

For an example...in the book, the authors have an interesting strategic canvass graph approach that supposes to prove how Blue Ocean events come about. That's fine, but how do you prove it? Moreover, the 'values' are different for each company, so there is nothing consistent to glean from this.

What I'd like to have seen is a Dash Board type matrix template that allows any company or budding entrepreneur to carry out Blue Ocean due diligence on any industry or market niches...proofing these Blue Ocean catchments from a zero learning curve application! The book does have important points but lacks the cutting edge tools to unify Blue Ocean diligence and proofs for any company!

Thus, what this book lacks is a more honed processing of enquiry from the authors. And I suspect this to be the case because like many academics they haven't proven the unifying dynamics that goes into capturing Blue Ocean strategies for themselves with businesses they have built through their own mindset!

Again, this book is a case of 'do what I say, because I don't have to prove what I say'.

There are great industry shapers out there who can shift and move whole industries and markets in their favour...but the authors of this book are not one of them.

However, there are great positives the authors have identified. The book contains a very interesting 'Strategic Grid' technique. From this simple grid technique any one can mentally survey how to change one's industry or market from a macro-vantage point. But shifting and moving your new found Blue Ocean grid at a tactical level to rule your competition making them irrelevant is another matter entirely. The chapters that explain this grid are worth the book, but don't expect any thing else.

What you really want is a knowledge base that allows you to dig out Blue Ocean criteria from a template of enquiring tools STACKED PROCESS BY PROCESS UNTIL YOU PROOF YOUR OWN BLUE OCEAN POWER. This book fails on this!

I would suggest that any one buying this book should read 'Blue Print to a Billion by David Thomson to understand how real Blue Ocean executions are carried out correctly. In addition, Chet Holmes' Ultimate Sales Machine' gets you to understand how to carry out big frame strategies at the tactical level.

Both these books will plug the holes lacking with Kim & Mauborgne's work.

I like the non text book clear presentation. You do not have to have an MBA to enjoy and learn from this book.

You should read this book if only to be reminded that putting your prices down is never a good idea! My company has been struggling for decent growth in a mature market because all our competitors keep offering 20% and 30% discounts to gain new business and yet there isn't the 60-70% growth in the market to be had to make up for that loss of margin. We have tried to stay out of this kind of "red ocean" fight and as a result, though our market share is not as great, our profits are higher! It was good to read a book that reaffirms our values as a company and re-encourges us to stick to this strategy. I am doubtful however whether or not making the competition irrelevant can actually be achieved.

I can't understand the reason behing all the good ratings and hype. Perhaps it's because the catchy name and the human relentless search for new fashions and trends. It's also interesting to notice that the book was written by two professors who lack the real world experience and challenge of running a company. They use past success stories that match their theory while neglecting the others. The concept of differentiation through quality or cost was presented several years ago by Michael Porter, and the Quality Function Deployment and Kano Models are excellent tools for describing the customer value.

An excellent way to understand and take advantage of competitor-free markets. All you need to add is innovation to the kitty and you get a great company. Probably, 'Eightstorm: 8-Step Brainstorming for Innovative Managers' can provide the clue to innovation. I highly recommed 'Blue Ocean Strategy' to anyone who needs a clearer corporate vision.

These guys are real pros! A true analytical analysis to developing your own non-competitive market space.