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

W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne

Harvard Business School Press (1 Jan 2005)

Reviews

Fort Worth Star Telegram, 14 February 2005
"Companies struggling to stay afloat in the market's...red oceans would do well to look into Blue Ocean Strategy."

American Way, March 2005
"Blue Ocean raises pertinent questions… and delivers valuable answers."

BusinessWeek, April 4th 2005
"Blue Ocean Strategy will have you wondering why companies need so much persuasion to stay out of shark-infested waters."

Eye-opening

This is a very well thought through and researched piece of work. It is a must -read for any CEO who wants his company to operate in a space different from the beaten track.

The book puts together a pack of simple yet powerful tools to conceptualize the new space, define it in detail, craft a profit strategy, and actualize its implementation.

The examples used are penetratively insightful, and liberal in number for the point(s) to be driven home.

Although primarily geared more for B2C businesses, the broad principles can be extrapolated for any type of business.

I was pleasantly intrigued to find that on the back of this book someone has actually created a service offering and started a boutique consulting firm. That is very impressive indeed.

Read the first half of the book - excellent. 2nd half- dull

I have been reading their reviews over the years and its good to see a summary book of their principles of value innovation. Their contextual examples really emphasise their thoughts well and for any practising marketeer, the strategic canvass section is an excellent tool in developing genuine new market space. By identifying key qualities in a market, or consumer need, and then reducing, eliminating, increasing or creating qualities, new market space is found. The end of the book is filler and offers no more insight than many other books on similar subjects - but then at least you only have to read half the book to gets it true value.

Don't waste your time reading this.

This is again one of these books trying to create a new management theory after the fact. There is nothing innovative explaining the obvious, and the authors clearly had trouble filling the pages, because it's very repetitive. Don't waste your money on this one.