This book raises a very interesting question which, I believe, does not get enough attention in business writing - succeeding by avoiding competition. But other than getting you to think about this topic and a couple of cool tips on performing organizational change, this book contains very little useful information. It spreads itself too thin and accomplishes nothing

Another great model. That doesn't take into account halo effect and bias in the data. Great for having a tool and framework for business model, but not an generalised model. Read Phil Rosenzweig book to get perspectives on the common mistakes from its data

Очаквах нещо съвсем различно, но книгата ми допадна, защото на разбираем за неикономист език и с много примери разказва за стратегията Син океан и способността на някои компании да променят правилата на играта, като създават толкова иновативни продукти и услуги, че за известно време нямат никаква конкуренция. Airbnb, Uber и подобни. Книгата е писана по-отдавна, някъде през 90-те може би, затова примерите са други, но наистина бяха много интересни. Как компаниите да напускат "червения" океан, където безспирно се състезават с конкуренцията чрез по-добри качества и цена, и да погледнат нещата отвъд собствената си индустрия, за да разберат какви фундаментални промени могат да предложат, които да задоволят нуждите на клиентите си. На места звучи малко сладникаво и еднозначно, но за неикономисти, като начин за разчуване на съзнанието ми беше приятно :-)

Full review at Solomon Says:

Let's go through the pros and cons of this book. The idea that there are no eternally excellent companies, and that the strategic move, instead of the company should be the unit of analysis is compelling. The authors argue that all companies make mistakes, so we should look to their strategic moves for excellence or the lack thereof instead of the companies themselves.

Now for the con, which is pretty much the existence of this book. Anybody even remotely familiar with business will realize what a gigantic truism Blue Ocean Strategy is. “Create awesome things that everyone and their grandmother wants.”. This is literally all the book says. Sure. Why Not!!! Just let me put on my magic hat!

Innovation of the type that Kim and Mauborgne are suggesting is very, very hard. The Blue Ocean Strategy fails to acknowledge this difficulty. It takes the greatest challenge of corporate strategy and peddles an oversimplified solution through anecdotes and fancy terms.

Blue Ocean Strategy is not a theory. There is neither hypothesis nor attempted proof here. The whole thing goes backwards from effects to causes. What little “theory” is given is self-validating. We already know what the traits of a successful product/service are. It adds value to peoples lives and makes money for the company. The authors have made these two the hallmark of their “value innovation”, and since every successful new business meets these criteria, the authors pretend that the theroy is valid.

The book is also guilty of what Nassim Taleb calls “survivorship bias”. It analyzes only successful cases of blue ocean creation. If there is any industry segment which is trying to create blue oceans, it is startups. How many startups did all that this book suggests and yet failed?

Blue Ocean Strategy is a great tag line, but is actually a descriptive work masquerading as prescriptive theory. Read it only if you must.

I read this book as a way to prepare for my full time job (started back in July) and honestly it is a good read to understand the organization processes of a company. Little did I know that this book related to many topics that I learned in my UX classes during my undergrad journey. Overall, it was a good read and I would definitely recommend this book.

I found an entire paragraph that had been copy-pasted from one chapter to another. Poor writing and editing lowered my opinion of this book, as well as not having a strong summarizing chapter. I didn't realize it was ending until I saw the Appendices starting.

I never write reviews. But I’ll do it this time. It will be at least some satisfaction and compensation for time wasted on this book.

Blue ocean as a concept - fine. Nothing wrong about it. But do you have to describe it in the most boring way possible? It is so boring it’s deadly - you’ll fell asleep and choke to death trying to chew it.

Good luck

This is a business school sort of trade book that has been getting a lots of hype. I had to read it for some other purposes so I worked through the book rather than through the numerous HBR articles. The premise of this book is that firms should not bother with messy competition, which will limit their profits and keep them warring with other competitors. Instead, firms should redefine their businesses into new offerings that are appealing to customers but are in such conditions or situations that other firms cannot easily imitate them. This is "blue ocean" strategy - in which you are the only fish in a big pond. The alternative, of course, is "red ocean" strategy - red because there are other fishes in the pond, whose competition will bloody the waters. Get the analogy?? Examples are provided of firms that have done this and suggestions are made about how to copy them. The writing style is crisp.

OK, but the problem is that there is nothing new here.

Coming up with a distinctive position that is very attractive to customers and that will justify high prices and good profits is a very old idea. Who wouldn't want to do that? The problem is that finding such opportunities happens most times through a combination of some skill and more luck. The firms that do this, and the examples in the book, have not escaped competition and their advantage does not last for long on average.

Telling someone to go out and follow such a strategy is a little bit like the old joke about the cure to poverty being simple - step 1, get yourself a million dollars; Step 2 . . .
(I think Steve Martin originally did this.)

The examples are not really helpful. Given a successful firm, it will not prove hard to find a reason why it succeeded. That is not helpful for someone else moving forward.

Overall, this is a popular treatment of corporate strategy that oversimplifies a lot. Careful readers can find better meals on which to chew.

Insightful presentation of business strategy. Centered around finding new markets by creating unprecedented value that consumers will seek out the,selves. For novices like myself, this feels like a groundbreaking read.

This book is an essential read for any entrepreneur looking to compete in a saturated marketplace and build a successful business. Too many startups fail because founders try to compete directly with well-established companies that dominate the market. The Blue Ocean Strategy is a book about finding your niche within a niche so you can stay competitive and grow.

This book has a few good insights. The core premise: as a business, you should minimize time spent in "red oceans," where fierce, bloody competition has turned the waters red, and instead look for "blue oceans" where you create a new market that is uncontested. Instead of beating the competition, you look to make them irrelevant; instead of squabbling over existing demand, you create and capture new demand; instead of incrementally tweaking the value-cost trade-off, you break the value-cost trade-off curve entirely; and so on.

To some extent, this is an obvious idea, but the reality is that most businesses don't make seeking out blue oceans an explicit goal. The tips in this book offer a useful mental model for making this happen and I've already found that merely having these ideas in your head gives you a new perspective when thinking about products and businesses. The main downside to the book is that it uses a lot of business jargon, including many of it's own buzzwords, so parts off it can be painful to read. But overall, it has lots of useful ideas in it. Here are a few of the top ones from my notes:

1. It may seem that creating a blue ocean is impossible, but the reality is that it happens all the time. It may be hard to see what these blue oceans are today, but when you look back at the great businesses of each decade, you realize that many of them succeeded precisely by creating totally new markets and not by out-competing other companies in existing markets. For example, Cirque du Soleil avoided the red ocean of competing with traditional circuses (e.g., Ringling Brothers) and created a totally new market for itself; Netjets created a new market by offering fractional ownership of a private jet (e.g., you get it for X days per year) rather than competing with other companies that sold private jets; Southwest Airlines created a totally new market in air travel by using secondary airports to offer flights that were so cheap that they were comparable to bus travel.

2. 6 paths for finding blue oceans. To find blue oceans, you'll need to think about what your industry is competing on that no longer matters and what it's not competing on that now does matter. Here are 6 concepts to explore to find blue oceans:

- Look to other industries. If you own a movie theater, instead of focusing on how to compete with other movie theaters, you may look to other industries for ideas. For example, the restaurant and sports industries may seem different, but in many cases, they serve the same purpose as movie theaters: giving people a way to enjoy a night out. A few movie theater chains have started to explore blue oceans in precisely these directions, combining fine dining (more than just popcorn) with movie and showing live sports events on the big screen at the theater (with all the other fans there too).

- Look at strategic groups within an industry. For example, luxury cars and economy cars are different strategic groups in the same industry. Most groupings happen by offering different combinations of price and performance. You may be able to find a blue ocean by offering a novel combination of price and performance: e.g., the first minivans and the first SUVs each created blue oceans for the auto makers that brought them to market.

- Look at different buyer groups. For example, if you're in the medical industry, does your product target the doctor or the patient? You can find blue oceans by targeting a different buyer group than other companies do: e.g., getting into enterprise software by targeting end users rather than the CIO.

- Look at complementary products and services. Another way to create blue oceans is to solve the entire problem for a customer, rather than just part off it, by offering complementary products and services. For example, if you're a movie theater owner, two of the things that could create a blue ocean for you are (a) offering free parking and (b) offering child care. This could unlock a massive new market of busy parents who never would've otherwise gone to see a movie, but if they can drive up, easily park, and have someone watch their kids for a few hours, they might flood to your theater.

- Look across functional and emotional appeal to buyers. Most industries focus mostly on either functional appeal (what the product can do) or emotional appeal (how the product makes you feel). You may be able to create a blue ocean by focusing on whichever aspect your industry typically ignores. For example, one company that produced cement—an industry that's all about functional appeal—created a massive blue ocean by focusing on family traditions around building and extending houses. Their cement was no better from a functional perspective than anyone else's, but because the company was part of family tradition, it created massive emotional demand.

- Look across time. Another path to blue oceans is to take advantage of macro market trends that are decisive and irreversible. For example, as a technology such as the Internet appeared on the scene, most business made small, incremental changes to adopt it (e.g., "check out our website" instead of "call us at..."), but the ones that created blue oceans figured out how this new trend completely changed the value proposition for the customer (e.g., creating an 100% online store, such as Amazon).

3. To create a blue ocean, you must create a leap in value for both buyers and the company. It's not enough to offer something slightly better or slightly cheaper than the competition. You have to make radical changes to completely transform the cost-value curve, focusing on what customers really value and throwing away the rest. For example, when the car industry was just starting, most cars were built-to-order, with lots of customizations, so they were extremely expensive, took a long time to assemble, were hard to learn, and hard to maintain. Then came along the Ford Model T, which unlocked a massive new market by offering a huge leap in value: they got rid of all the customizations (there was just one model, in one color, with essentially no options) but in exchange, the car was cheap, fast to build, easy to learn, and easy to maintain. To create this sort of leap in value, you need to ask the following questions:

- Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
- Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
- What factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
- What factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

4. Spend less time thinking about how to segment existing customers and the differences between them and more time about how to find non-customers and what they have in common. Blue oceans are all about finding non-customers, those who don't currently buy products from your industry, and deeply understanding why. There are generally three types of non-customers: (a) "soon-to-be" non-customers, who are aware of your market and right on the edge of buying, (b) "refusing" non-customers, who are aware of your market and consciously choose not to buy from it, and (c) "unexplored" non-customers, who aren't aware of your market at all. If you can find what those non-customers have in common, you may be able to create a blue ocean by unlocking all of their demand.

I remember as a child asking my dad why I should pick up skiing over snowboarding. He responded that while snowboarding was certainly fun, because of its popularity it was also commonplace. Reasonably talented teenage snowboarders were a dime a dozen on any ski hill. Good young skiers, however, were few and far between. Reflecting on the choice between becoming one of the unwashed masses of snowboarders or one of the few, the happy few skiers, I chose the latter. Over the years being a reasonably good skier has served me well, differentiating myself from many of my peers and has created numerous business relationships and opportunities.

Kim and his co-authors take this basic concept and apply it to business. They suggest that positioning one's company away from popular and hotly contested "red ocean" and moving to less frequented "blue ocean" can pay huge dividends.

Blue Ocean Strategy differentiates itself from many business strategy books in that it doesn't simply dwell on this semi-novel strategic formulation, instead it includes numerous tools and suggestions for actively moving a company from red to blue ocean. Although some of the suggestions strike me as too esoteric to prove useful in a real business, the majority are simple, straight-forward, and can be utilized as useful thought experiments if nothing else.

All in all I found the book engaging a worthwhile read.