300 Inspiring W. Chan Kim Quotes From Blue Ocean Strategy

1. “Research in neuroscience and cognitive science shows that people remember and respond most effectively to what they see and experience.”

2. “Don’t compete. Create.”

3. “The natural strategic orientation of many companies is toward retaining existing customers and seeking further segmentation opportunities. This is especially true in the face of competitive pressure. Although this might be a good way to gain a focused competitive advantage and increase share of the existing market space, it is not likely to produce a blue ocean that expands the market and creates new demand.”

4. “Youth and skill will win out every time over age and treachery.

5. “stop looking to the competition. Value-innovate and let the competition worry about you.”

6. “The creators of blue oceans, surprisingly, didn’t use the competition as their benchmark.17 Instead, they followed a different strategic logic that we call value innovation. Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.”

7. “A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself. Great artists don’t paint from other people’s descriptions or even from photographs; they like to see the subject for themselves. The same is true for great strategists.”

8. “Blue ocean strategy does not see competition as bad. However, unlike traditional economic thought, it does not see competition as always good.”

9. “Competition is only good up to a point. When supply exceeds demand”

10. Understand where you are now: Pinpoint where the company currently stands in the market landscape. Compare your business to competitors to understand how the two differ and are similar. Use the value curve model above for this step.

11. “To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand.”

12. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.

13. “When people understand what is expected of them, political jockeying and favoritism are minimized, and people can focus on executing the strategy rapidly.”

14. “Organizational politics is an inescapable reality of corporate and public life.”

15. “Drawing a strategy canvas is never easy. Even identifying the key factors of competition is far from straightforward. As you will see, the final list is usually very different from the first draft.”

16. “Attempts to imitate a blue ocean creator conflict with the imitator’s existing brand image.”

17. “The first involves streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations from manufacturing to distribution.”

18. “Pain points and boundaries are not constraints. They are blatant opportunities to change the playing field of strategy.”

19. “We call this atomization after Einstein’s reflection that if you deconstruct any challenge into its basic components, or atoms, and focus on solving them one at a time, even the largest challenge shifts from being overwhelming to being intellectually and psychologically solvable.”

20. “Encouraging refutation sharpens everyone’s thinking and builds better collective wisdom”

21. “If a man didn't make mistakes he'd own the world in a month. But if he didn't profit by his mistakes he wouldn't own a blessed thing.”

22. “To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand. Research in neuroscience and cognitive science shows that people remember and respond most effectively to what they see and experience: “Seeing is believing.” In the realm of experience, positive stimuli reinforce behavior, whereas negative stimuli change attitudes and behavior. Simply”

23. “Instead of treating execution as something that happens after the strategy has been set, it needs to be built into the strategy from the start or people won’t own it.”

24. Voluntary cooperation is more than mechanical execution, where people do only what it takes to get by. It involves going beyond the call of duty, wherein individuals exert energy and initiative to the best of their abilities—even subordinating personal self-interest—to execute resulting strategies.3

25. “By looking across the market boundary of theater, Cirque du Soleil also offered new noncircus factors, such as a story line and, with it, intellectual richness, artistic music and dance, and multiple productions. These factors, entirely new creations for the circus industry, are drawn from the alternative live entertainment industry of theater.”

26. “Value innovation requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a leap in value for both buyers and themselves.”

27. “Simply creating something original and useful through innovation is not enough to create and capture a blue ocean.”

28. “Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.”

29. “Technology is not a defining feature. You can create blue oceans with or without it.”

30. “The lesson: noncustomers tend to offer far more insight into how to unlock and grow a blue ocean than do relatively content existing customers.”

31. “What are the strategic groups in your industry? Why do customers trade up for the higher group, and why do they trade down for the lower one?”

32. “As companies compete to embrace customer preferences through finer segmentation, they often risk creating too-small target markets.”

33. “A focus on beating the competition is counterproductive. The buyer, not the competition, should be replaced at the center of strategic thinking.”

34. “If you ask companies to present their proposed strategies in no more than a few slides, it is not surprising that few clear or compelling strategies are articulated.”

35. “strategy perforce becomes a zero-sum game where one company’s gain is another company’s loss”

36. “The natural strategic orientation of many companies is toward retaining existing customers and seeking further segmentation opportunities.”

37. “Large R&D budgets are not the key to creating new market space. The key is making the right strategic moves.”

38. “Don’t rely on market surveys.”

39. “Create. Don't Compete.”

40. “The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion”

41. “To stand apart in these overcrowded markets, you need to be creative through value innovation.”

42. “It appears, then, that neither the company nor the industry is the best unit of analysis in studying the roots of profitable growth. Consistent with this observation, our study shows that the strategic move, and not the company or the industry, is the right unit of analysis for explaining the creation of blue oceans and sustained high performance. A strategic move is the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering.”

43. “You need to be patient, but not passive.”

44. “Perspective is critical to success. Your mind-set is more ingrained than you realize.”

45. “The planning process doesn’t produce strategy”

46. “For any strategy to be successful and sustainable, an organization must develop an offering that attracts buyers; it must create a business model that enables the company to make money out of its offering; and it must motivate the people working for or with the Company to execute the strategy.”

47. “Blue ocean strategy challenges companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant.”

48. “When exceptional utility is combined with strategic pricing, imitation is discouraged.”

49. “A good way to test the effectiveness and strength of a strategy is to look at whether it contains a strong and authentic tagline.”

50. “Strategy is heavily influenced by its roots in military strategy. The very language of strategy is deeply imbued with military references— chief executive “officers” in “headquarters,” “troops” on the “front lines.” Described this way, strategy is all about red ocean competition. It is about confronting an opponent and driving him off a battlefield of limited territory.”

51. “We hoped to push managers to create innovative proposals and break the boundaries of their conventional thinking.”

52. “Disengaged employees are an unfortunate reality in the workplace, and poor leadership is often to blame.”

53. “Find the right price for an irresistible offer, which, by the way, isn’t necessarily the lower price.”

54. “They reveal that for major product and service categories, brands are generally becoming more similar, and as they are becoming more similar, people increasingly select based on price.”

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

56. “Define their industry similarly and focus on being the best within it Look at their industries through the lens of generally accepted strategic groups (such as luxury automobiles, economy cars, and family vehicles), and strive to stand out in the strategic group they play in Focus on the same buyer group, be it the purchaser (as in the office equipment industry), the user (as in the clothing industry), or the influencer (as in the pharmaceutical industry) Define the scope of the products and services offered by their industry similarly Accept their industry’s functional or emotional orientation Focus on the same point in time—and often on current competitive threats—in formulating strategy”

57. “Strategic move will be well placed to create multiple blue oceans over time, thereby continuing to deliver high growth and profits over a sustained period.”

58. “It immediately flags companies that are focused only on raising and creating and thereby lifting their cost structure and often overengineering products and services—a common plight in many companies.”

59. “Engagement means involving individuals in the strategic decisions that affect them by asking for their input and allowing them to refute the merits of one another’s ideas and assumptions.”

60. “Value innovation not technology innovation is what opens up commercially compelling new markets.”

61. Find out how to get there: Reconstruct market boundaries in order to create a new market space. Pursue both differentiation and low cost. This is the step where you utilize the Four Actions Framework (see above) and construct six blue ocean strategic moves (see below). Ultimately, your company wants to pioneer products and services that offer unprecedented value. These are your blue ocean offerings and the most powerful source of profitable growth.

62. “By focusing on the key factors that lead buyers to trade across alternative industries and eliminating or reducing everything else, you can create a blue ocean of new market space.”

63. “By probing questions such as these, the Swiss watch company Swatch, for example, was able to arrive at a cost structure some 30 percent lower than any other watch company in the world. At the start, Nicolas Hayek, chairman of Swatch, set up a project team to determine the strategic price for the Swatch. At the time, cheap (about $75), high-precision quartz watches from Japan and Hong Kong were capturing the mass market. Swatch set the price at $40, a price at which people could buy multiple Swatches as fashion accessories. The low price left no profit margin for Japanese or Hong Kong–based companies to copy Swatch and undercut its price. Directed to sell the Swatch for that price and not a penny more, the Swatch project team worked backwards to arrive at the target cost, a process that involved determining the margin Swatch needed to support marketing and services and earn a profit. Given”

64. “To reach your organization’s tipping point and execute blue ocean strategy, you must alert employees to the need for a strategic shift and identify how it can be achieved with limited resources. For a new strategy to become a movement, people must not only recognize what needs to be done, but they must also act on that insight in a sustained and meaningful way. How”

65. “Our research reveals that most companies’ strategic planning process keeps them wedded to red oceans. The process tends to drive companies to compete within existing market space.”

66. “Untapped value is often hidden in complementary products and services. The key is to define the total solution buyers seek when they choose a product or service. A simple way to do so is to think about what happens before, during, and after your product is used.”

67. Alternative industries: Act as if you’re the customer who is constantly weighing the pros and cons of different options. For example, when people travel, they can take a flight or train. Ask yourself why customers choose one over the other. How can your company create demand for your offerings over the competitors? What are the key reasons your current noncustomers may want to jump ship and leave your industry?

68. “Grabbing a bigger share of the market is a zero-sum game in which one company’s gain is achieved at another company’s loss. Blue ocean strategy is a non-zero-sum game that shifts the focus of strategy from win-lose to win-win.”

69. “What trends have a high probability of impacting your industry, are irreversible, and are evolving in a clear trajectory? How will these trends impact your industry? Given this, how can you open up unprecedented customer utility?”

70. “Blue ocean strategy empowers organizations by providing a set of analytics tools and frameworks that any company can apply and reshape industry boundaries in their favor and leave the competition behind.”

71. “Few products and services are used in a vacuum. In most cases, other products and services affect their value”

72. Chain of buyers: Do the people who pay for the product or service differ from the actual users (for example, doctors who use pharmaceuticals instead of patients)? Are there important influencers in this industry? If you shifted the buyer group, how could you unlock new value?

73. “What is the context in which your product or service is used? What happens before, during, and after? Can you identify the pain points? How can you eliminate these pain points through a complementary product or service offering?”

74. “blue oceans were seldom the result of technological innovation per se;”

75. “Tal como nos decía uno de los ejecutivos de Virgin Group, «no debemos permitir que lo que podemos hacer ahora condicione nuestro punto de vista sobre lo que se necesita hacer para ganar mañana. Nuestro enfoque es de pizarra limpia».”

76. “The key here is not to pursue pricing against the competition within an industry but rather to pursue pricing against substitutes and alternatives across industries and nonindustries.”

77. “the strategic price you set for your offering must not only attract buyers in large numbers but also help you to retain them.”

78. “Blue ocean strategy is not about finding a better or lower-cost solution to the existing problem of an industry. Instead, it is about redefining the problem itself.”

79. “The key questions answered by tipping point leaders are as follows: What factors or acts exercise a disproportionately positive influence on breaking the status quo?”

80. “Don’t fight alone. Get the higher and wider voice to fight with you. Identify your detractors and supporters—forget the middle—and strive to create a win-win outcome for both. But move quickly. Isolate your detractors by building a broader coalition with your angels before a battle begins. In this way, you will discourage the war before it has a chance to start or gain steam.”

81. “Blue ocean strategists simultaneously pursue differentiation and low cost. They aim to break, not make, the value-cost trade-off.”

82. “While good strategy content is based on a compelling value proposition for buyers with a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating-people proposition.”

83. “The first involves streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations from manufacturing to distribution. Can the product’s or service’s raw materials be replaced by unconventional, less expensive ones—such as switching from metal to plastic or shifting a call center from the UK to Bangalore? Can high-cost, low-value-added activities in your value chain be significantly eliminated, reduced, or outsourced? Can the physical location of your product or service be shifted from prime real estate locations to lower-cost locations, as The Home Depot, IKEA, and Walmart have done in retail or Southwest Airlines has done by shifting from major to secondary airports? Can you truncate the number of parts or steps used in production by shifting the way things are made, as Ford did by introducing the assembly line? Can you digitize activities to reduce costs? By”

84. “Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is. And a closer look reveals that most plans don’t contain a strategy at all but rather a smorgasbord of tactics that individually make sense but collectively don’t add up to a unified, clear direction that sets a company apart—let alone makes the competition irrelevant. Does this sound like the strategic plans in your company?”

85. “Value innovators don’t assume that just because competitors are doing something they should follow suit and do it too. They pursue a quantum leap in value.”

86. “These may individually make sense and keep the business running and everyone busy, but collectively they do little to distinguish the company from the best competitor or to provide a clear strategic vision.”

87. “According to Gallup, only 30% of employees actively apply their talent and energy to move their organizations forward.”

88. “Focusing on beating the competition and aiming to build competitive advantages frequently leads to imitative, not innovative approaches to the market.”

89. “Visualizing strategy can help managers predict the company’s future growth and profit.”

90. “To reach your organization’s tipping point and execute blue ocean strategy, you must alert employees to the need for a strategic shift and identify how it can be achieved with limited resources. For a new strategy to become a movement, people must not only recognize what needs to be done, but they must also act on that insight in a sustained and meaningful way. How.”

91. “Unless the technology makes buyers’ lives dramatically simpler, more convenient, more productive, less risky, or more fun and fashionable, it will not attract the masses no matter how many awards it wins.”

92. “If you can move people by inspiring and building their confidence to own and drive your new strategy, they will be committed to seeing change through and overcoming the organizational constraints you confront.”

93. “The more that companies share this conventional wisdom about how they compete, the greater the competitive convergence among them.”

94. “In this way, blue ocean strategy makes sense of the strategic paradox many organizations face: the more they focus on coping with the competition, and striving to match and beat their advantages, the more they ironically tend to look like the competition. To which blue ocean strategy would respond, stop looking to the competition. Value-innovate and let the competition worry about you.”

95. “The cost side of a company’s business model ensures that it creates a leap in value for itself in the form of profit – that is, the price of the offering minus the cost of production. It is the combination of exceptional utility, strategic pricing, and target costing that allows companies to achieve value innovation – a.”

96. “No wonder market research rarely reveals new insights into what attracts customers. Industries have trained customers on what to expect. When surveyed, they echo back: more of the same for less.”

97. “What are the alternative industries to your industry? Why do customers trade across them? By focusing on the key factors that lead buyers to trade across alternative industries and eliminating or reducing everything else, you can create a blue ocean of new market space.”

98. “There are two types of strategy: structuralist strategies that assume that the operating environment is given and reconstructionist strategies that seek to shape the environment.”

99. “A focus on the competition too often anchors companies in the red ocean, and puts the competitors, rather than the customer, at the core of strategy.”

100. “In our experience, the more an industry is populated by settlers, the greater is the opportunity to value-innovate and create a blue ocean of new market space.”

101. “There are three mutually reinforcing elements that define fair process: engagement, explanation, and clarity of expectation”

102. “plans, as of yet there has been no theory or process for true strategy creation. We believe the four-step process proposed here goes a long way to correct this situation. By being built around a picture, it addresses many of managers’ discontents with existing strategic planning and yields much better results. As Aristotle pointed out, “The soul never thinks without an image.”

103. “Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space. Value innovation places equal emphasis on value.”

104. “Messages communicated through numbers seldom stick with people”

105. “Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have.”

106. “Instead of drilling down and finding ways to creatively meet the target cost as Ford did, if companies give in to the tempting route of either bumping up the strategic price or cutting back on utility, they are not on the path to lucrative blue waters.”

107. “It is important to distinguish between value innovation as opposed to technology innovation and market pioneering.”

108. “The greatest blocks to utility often represent the greatest and most pressing opportunities to unlock exceptional value.”

109. “This is not to suggest that companies will suddenly stop competing or that the competition will suddenly come to a halt. On the contrary, the competition will be more present and will remain a critical factor of market reality. As captured on the dynamic PMS map, red ocean and blue ocean strategies are complementary strategic perspectives, with each serving different and important purposes.”

110. “Blue ocean strategy 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.”

111. “At the same time, by eliminating many of the most costly elements of the circus, it dramatically reduced its cost structure, achieving both differentiation and low cost. Cirque strategically priced its tickets against those of the theater, lifting the price point of the circus industry by several multiples while still pricing its productions to capture the mass of adult customers, who were used to theater prices.”

112. “The hardest battle is simply to make people aware of the need for a strategic shift and to agree on its causes”

113. “Blue ocean strategy 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.”

114. “Voluntary cooperation is more than mechanical execution, where people do only what it takes to get by. It involves going beyond the call of duty, wherein individuals exert energy and initiative to the best of their abilities – even subordinating personal self-interest – to execute resulting strategies.3.”

115. “It immediately flags companies that are focused only on raising and creating and thereby lifting their cost structure and often overengineering products and services–a common plight in many companies.”

116. “It immediately flags companies that are focused only on raising and creating and thereby lifting their cost structure and often overengineering products and services – a common plight in many companies.”

117. “adopting a blue ocean creator’s business model is easier to imagine than to do. Because blue ocean creators immediately attract customers in large volumes, they are able to generate scale economies very rapidly, putting would-be imitators at an immediate and continuing cost disadvantage.”

118. “Every company wants one, yet only a few companies have one: a compelling strategy.”

119. “Blue ocean strategy is not about being first to market. Rather it’s about being first to get it right by linking innovation to value.”

120. “There are two ways to create blue oceans. In a few cases, companies can give rise to completely new industries, as eBay did with the online auction industry. But in most cases, a blue ocean is created from within a red ocean when a company alters the boundaries of an existing industry.”

121. “luck, of course, will always play a role, as it does with all strategies”

122. “Voluntary cooperation is more than mechanical execution, where people do only what it takes to get by. It involves going beyond the call of duty, wherein individuals exert energy and initiative to the best of their abilities—even subordinating personal self-interest—to execute resulting strategies.”

123. “The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.”

124. “Get focused on (..) understanding how to deliver a leap in value to buyers”

125. Strategic groups within industries: How do price and performance compare within your industry? Why do customers trade up and pay more for the higher group, and why do they trade down for the lower one?

126. “Blue oceans are the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand.”

127. “Identify where the mass of target buyers is and what prices these buyers are prepared to pay for the products and services they currently use.”

128. “What Is Blue Ocean Strategy: About Blue Ocean Strategy.” Blue Ocean Strategy, www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-strategy/.

129. “By questioning conventional definitions of who can and should be the target buyer, companies can often see fundamentally new ways to unlock value.”

130. “This is a trap many companies fall into. Lacking a holistic understanding of strategy”

131. “Corporate graveyards are full of companies that got to market first with innovative offerings not linked to value.”

132. “industry history shows, new market spaces are being created every day and are fluid with imagination.”

133. “Many companies take their industries’ conditions as given and set strategy accordingly. Value innovators don’t. No matter how the rest of the industry is faring, value innovators look for blockbuster ideas and quantum leaps in value.”

134. “As shown in figure 2-2, to break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost and to create a new value curve, there are four key questions to challenge an industry’s strategic logic and business model: Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard? Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard? Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?”

135. “As of yet there has been no theory or process for true strategy creation.”

136. Complementary products and services: What happens before, during, and after the time when your product is used? Can you identify the pain points and eliminate them to make using your product or service easier?

137. “The underlying logic was that increments in performance could be achieved only with proportional increments in resources—the same inherent logic guiding most companies’ view of performance gains.”

138. “Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources, on the one hand, and multiply the value of resources, on the other. These are hot spots, cold spots, and horse trading. Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact. In every organization, hot spots and cold spots typically abound. Horse trading involves trading your unit’s excess resources in one area for another unit’s excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps. By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright. What”

139. “individuals seek recognition of their value, not as “labor,” “personnel,” or “human resources” but as human beings who are treated with full respect and dignity and appreciated for their individual worth regardless of hierarchical level.”

140. “When organizations fail to register the difference between value innovation and innovation per se, they all too often end with an innovation that breaks new ground but does not unlock the mass of target buyers”

141. “senior managers’ goal here should be to manage their portfolio of businesses to wisely balance between profitable growth and cash flow at a given point in time.”

142. “Yet few leaders exploit the power of this rapid wake-up call. Rather, they do the opposite. They try to garner support based on a numbers case that lacks urgency and emotional impetus. Or they try to put forth the most exemplary case of their operational excellence to garner support. Although these alternatives may work, neither leads to tipping superiors’ cognitive hurdle as fast and stunningly as showing the worst. When.”

143. “Voluntary cooperation is more than mechanical execution, where people do only what it takes to get by. It involves going beyond the call of duty, wherein individuals exert energy and initiative to the best of their abilities—even subordinating personal self-interest—to execute resulting strategies.3”

144. “Organizational leaders often accept and act on two fundamental assumptions. One is that market boundaries and industry conditions are given. You cannot change them. You have to build your strategy based on them. 4 The other is that, to succeed within these environmental constraints, an organization must make a strategic choice between differentiation and low cost. Either it can deliver greater value to customers at a greater cost and hence a higher price, or it can deliver reasonable value at a lower cost. But it can’t do both. Hence, the essence of strategy is seen as making a value-cost trade-off.”

145. “executives are often reluctant to accept the need for change; they may have a vested interest in the status quo, or they may feel that time will eventually vindicate their previous choices. Indeed, when we ask executives what prompts them to seek out blue oceans and introduce change, they usually say that it takes a highly determined leader or a serious crisis.”

146. “Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact.”

147. “Unless people believe that the strategic challenge is attainable, the change is not likely to succeed.”

148. “The Pivotal Lever: Disproportionate Influence Factors The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion. Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise”

149. “Neither the company nor the industry is the best unit of analysis in studying the roots of profitable growth.”

150. “By fair process we mean engaging all the affected people in the process”

151. “What a blue ocean strategist recognizes, and what most of us all too often forget, is that while industry conditions exist, individual firms created them. And just as individual firms created them, individual firms can shape them too,”

152. “when a company offers a leap in value, it rapidly earns brand buzz and a loyal following in the marketplace. Even large advertising budgets by an aggressive imitator rarely have the strength to overtake the brand buzz earned by the value innovator.”

153. “Los innovadores de valor buscan ideas de éxito y saltos sustanciales en valor, sin que les importe demasiado cómo le va al sector.”

154. “By violating fair process in making and rolling out strategies, managers can turn their best employees into their worst, earning their distrust of and resistance to the very strategy they depend on them to execute. But if managers practice fair process, the worst employees can turn into the best and can execute even difficult strategic shifts with their willing commitment while building their trust.”

155. Time: Working backward, what do you need to start doing strategically to unlock the future blue ocean? For example, Apple observed the flood of illegal music files shared by Napster and predicted that the future of music buying was online. Apple then created iTunes to help customers legally buy downloadable, high-quality songs.

156. “Blue ocean strategy is an opportunity-maximizing risk-minimizing strategy.”

157. “Does your industry compete on functionality or emotional appeal? If you compete on emotional appeal, what elements can you strip out to make it functional? If you compete on functionality, what elements can be added to make it emotional?”

158. “Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is.”

159. “The assumption that bleeding-edge technology is equivalent to bleeding-edge utility for buyers—something that, our research found, is rarely the case.”

160. “brand building increasingly relies heavily on word-of-mouth recommendations spreading rapidly through our networked society.”

161. “Corporate graveyards are full of companies that got to market first with innovative offerings not linked to value”.

162. “A market becomes stagnant and develops a growth problem as the number of soon-to-be noncustomers increases”

163. “Beyond streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations, a second lever companies can pull to meet their target cost is partnering. In bringing a new product or service to market, many companies mistakenly try to carry out all the production and distribution activities themselves. Sometimes that’s because they see the product or service as a platform for developing new capabilities. Other times it is simply a matter of not considering other outside options. Partnering, however, provides a way for companies to secure needed capabilities fast and effectively while dropping their cost structure. It allows a company to leverage other companies’ expertise and economies of scale. Partnering includes closing gaps in capabilities through making small acquisitions when doing so is faster and cheaper, providing access to needed expertise that has already been mastered. A”

164. “Blue oceans are right next to you in every industry.”

165. “many companies fail to deliver exceptional value because they are obsessed by the novelty of their product or service, especially if new technology plays a part in it.”

166. “To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand. Research in neuroscience and cognitive science shows that people remember and respond most effectively to what they see and experience: “Seeing is believing.” In the realm of experience, positive stimuli reinforce behavior, whereas negative stimuli change attitudes and behavior. Simply.”

167. “The planning process doesn’t produce strategy.”

168. “Blue ocean strategy allows companies to set the rules of the game”.

169. “Value innovation is not the same as technology innovation.”

170. “The rule here is to go for the largest catchment that your organization has competence to seize.”

171. “nos aferramos a lo que conocemos, incluso a sabiendas de que no deberíamos”

172. “Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is. And a closer look reveals that most plans don’t contain a strategy at all but rather a smorgasbord of tactics that individually make sense but collectively don’t add up to a unified, clear direction that sets a company apart – let alone makes the competition irrelevant. Does this sound like the strategic plans in your company?”

173. “An Incoherent Strategy When a company’s value curve looks like a bowl of spaghetti—a zigzag with no rhyme or reason, where the offering can be described as “low-high-low-low-high-low-high”—it signals that the company doesn’t have a coherent strategy. Its strategy is likely based on independent substrategies. These may individually make sense and keep the business running and everyone busy, but collectively they do little to distinguish the company from the best competitor or to provide a clear strategic vision. This is often a reflection of an organization with divisional or functional silos.”

174. “What we look for determines what we see. When we assume that the only way we can create a new market is by disrupting an old one, opportunities for nondisruptive creation can be easily missed. People tend to focus their attention on the core of existing markets and what it would take to disrupt the existing order. This narrows their vision and blinds them to the wealth of nondisruptive market-creating moves they could make.”

175. Imagine where you could be: Identify needs that aren’t currently being met in the marketplace and “hidden pain points” that could be improved upon. These pain points are the main opportunities that your business can take advantage of. Determine how your customers can be pleased more with products or services that are “excellent,” meaning they’re entertaining, unique, educational, engaging, and affordable.

176. “Today, one hardly talks about strategy without using the language of competition.”

177. “Simply put, there is no substitute for meeting and listening to dissatisfied customers directly.”

178. Get started: Pick the right type of business to create and the best market for your service or product. Hire innovative and motivated employees who can help get the job done.

179. “cuando un sector es atractivo, si las empresas participantes están bien afianzadas y una organización no tiene los recursos ni las competencias para enfrentarse a ellas, el enfoque estructuralista no va a producir grandes resultados. En este escenario, la organización tiene que elaborar una estrategia que cree un nuevo espacio de mercado para sí misma.”

180. “Effective blue ocean strategy should be about risk minimization and not risk taking”

181. “The creation of blue oceans, in other words, is a product of strategy and as such is very much a product of managerial action.”

182. “Experiences that don’t involve touching, seeing, or feeling actual results, such as being presented with an abstract sheet of numbers, are shown to be non-impactful and easily forgotten.”

183. “to win in the future, companies must stop competing with each other. The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.”

184. “A rising call for creative new solutions. Just look at a broad swath of industries that matter fundamentally to who we are: health care,”

185. “Focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors”

186. Make your move: Create a big-picture business model and test the blue ocean idea. Then, refine the business strategy based on feedback. Blue ocean strategy should also be institutionalized as a repeatable process in an organization.

187. “Noncustomers, not customers, hold the greatest insight into an industry’s pain points and points of intimidation that limit the size and boundary of the industry.”

188. “Value innovation places equal emphasis on value and innovation. Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, something that improves value but is not sufficient to make you stand out in the marketplace.”

189. “The logic of value innovation starts with an ambition to dominate the market by offering a tremendous leap in value. Value innovators never say, Here’s what competitors are doing; let’s do this in response.”

190. “Once a company creates a blue ocean and its powerful performance consequences are known, sooner or later imitators appear on the horizon.”

191. “Blue ocean strategists do not seek to beat the competition. Instead they aim to make the competition irrelevant.”

192. “Companies with a diverse portfolio of businesses, such as Apple, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, or Procter & Gamble, will always need to swim in both red and blue oceans at a given point in time and succeed in both oceans at the corporate level. This means that understanding and applying the competition-based principles of red ocean strategy are also needed.”

193. “An effective blue ocean strategy has three complementary qualities: focus, divergence and a compelling tagline.”

194. “In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set.”

195. “blue ocean strategy is a theory of market creation”

196. “the reason buyers love these blue ocean offerings isn’t because they involve bleeding-edge technology per se, but because these offerings make the technology essentially disappear from buyers’ minds. The products and services are so simple, easy to use, fun, and productive that buyers fall in love with them.”

197. “While good strategy content hinges upon a compelling value proposition for buyers and a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating people proposition.”

198. A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself. Great artists don’t paint from other people’s descriptions or even from photographs; they like to see the subject for themselves. The same is true for great strategists.

199. “Great artists don’t paint from other people’s descriptions or even from photographs; they like to see the subject for themselves. The same is true for great strategists.”

200. “Every great strategy has focus, and a company’s strategic profile, or value curve, should clearly show it. Looking at Southwest’s profile, we can see at once that the company emphasizes only three factors: friendly service, speed, and frequent point-to-point departures.”

201. “A thriving blue ocean strategy is built on more than differentiation and low-cost in its value proposition. It must align value, profit, and people propositions so that each reinforces the others.”

202. “People realize that compromises and sacrifices are necessary in building a strong company. They accept the need for short-term personal sacrifices in order to advance the long-term interests of the corporation.”

203. “Although these alternatives may work, neither leads to tipping superiors’ cognitive hurdle as fast and stunningly as showing the worst.”

204. “there is no such thing as a riskless strategy Strategy will always involve both opportunity and risk,”

205. “It is conventionally believed that companies can either create greater value to customers at a higher cost or create reasonable value at a lower cost. Here strategy is seen as making a choice between differentiation and low cost.21 In contrast, those that seek to create blue oceans pursue differentiation and low cost simultaneously.”

206. “Moreover, when you ask existing customers, “How can we make you happier?” their insights tend toward the familiar, such as “Offer me more for less.” But this focus almost always drives you to merely offer better solutions to your industry’s existing problem, keeping you trapped in the red ocean.”

207. “Given the high potential for free riding, an offering’s reputation must be earned on day one, because brand building increasingly relies heavily on word-of-mouth recommendations spreading rapidly through our networked society.”

208. The Pivotal Lever: Disproportionate Influence Factors The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion. Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise

209. “A strategic move is the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering.”

210. “Most blue oceans are created from within, not beyond, red oceans of existing industries”

211. “If companies give in to the tempting route of either bumping up the strategic price or cutting back on utility, they are not on the path to lucrative blue waters.”

212. “strategy canvas, four actions framework, and six paths to reconstruct market boundaries—bring structure to what has historically been an unstructured problem in strategy, informing organizations’ ability to create blue oceans systematically.”

213. “In a study of business launches in 108 companies, we found that 86% of those new ventures were line extensions—incremental improvements to existing industry offerings—and a mere 14% were aimed at creating new markets or industries.”

214. “If your company is like most, your strategy is probably a hodge-podge or initiatives that individually may make sense, but collectively fail to produce a clear vision.”

215. “Competing in overcrowded industries is no way to sustain high performance. The real opportunity is to create blue oceans of uncontested market space.”

216. “To stand apart in overcrowded markets, you need to be creative through value innovation.”

217. “Value innovation anchors innovation to the value it gives buyers, not to the cleverness of the technology. It can be achieved with our without new technology.”

218. “Value innovation places equal emphasis on value and innovation. Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, something that improves value but is not sufficient to make you stand out in the marketplace.18 Innovation without value tends to be technology-driven, market pioneering, or futuristic, often shooting beyond what buyers are ready to accept and pay for.19 In this sense, it is important to distinguish between value innovation as opposed to technology innovation and market pioneering.”

219. “Debido a que operan en mercados en los que inicialmente no hay rivales, los innovadores de valor disfrutan de un extraordinario crecimiento. Hablemos de Starbucks, que transformó un producto funcional (café) en otro emocional con su cadena de «oasis inducidos por la cafeína» y que ofrece lugares de reunión chic, relajación y bebidas creativas a base de café. Starbucks opera con unos márgenes que son unas cinco veces superiores a la media del sector.”

220. “The traditional units of strategic analysis—company and industry—have little explanatory power when it comes to analyzing how and why blue oceans are created.

221. “while speed may be important, even more important is linking innovation to value. No company should rest easy until it achieves value innovation.”

222. “Blue ocean strategy, by contrast, shows how strategy can shape structure in an organization’s favor to create new market space.”

223. “Commitment, trust, and voluntary cooperation are not merely attitudes or behaviors. They are intangible capital. They allow companies to stand apart in the speed, quality, and consistency of their execution and to implement strategic shifts fast at low cost.”

224. “Drawing a strategy canvas is never easy. Even identifying the key factors of competition is far from straightforward. As you will see, the final list is usually very different from the first draft”

225. “Focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors.”

226. “Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, something that improves value but is not sufficient to make you stand out in the marketplace.”

227. “Focus, divergence, and a compelling tagline. Without these qualities, a company’s strategy will likely be muddled, undifferentiated, and hard to communicate with a high cost structure.”

228. “The value and profit propositions set out the content of a strategy. The people proposition determines the quality of execution”.

229. “We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.”

230. “The aim of blue ocean strategy was straightforward: to allow any organization—large or small, new or incumbent—to step up to the challenge of creating blue oceans in an opportunity-maximizing, risk-minimizing way”

231. “Value innovation, not technology innovation, is what opens up commercially compelling new markets.”

232. “Organizations that open up new value-cost frontiers think differently. That is, they think about different things than those that are focused only on competing in their current markets. They raise fundamentally different sets of questions that enable them to see and understand opportunities and risk in fresh and innovative ways. This allows them to conceive of different kinds and degrees of value to offer customers that others either can’t see at all or dismiss as impossible or irrelevant.”

233. “Numbers are disputable and uninspiring,”

234. “Create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant.”

235. “Focus on the big picture, not the numbers.”

236. “Standard Industrial Classification (SIC)”

237. “An Incoherent Strategy When a company’s value curve looks like a bowl of spaghetti—a zigzag with no rhyme or reason, where the offering can be described as “low-high-low-low-high-low-high”—it signals that the company doesn’t have a coherent strategy.”

238. “buyers from all markets had a basic set of needs and expected similar services. If you met those common needs, customers would happily forgo everything else.”

239. “Red oceans may not be the paths to future profitable growth, but they feel comfortable to people and may have even served an organization well until now, so why rock the boat?”

240. “By single-mindedly focusing on points of disproportionate influence, tipping point leaders can topple the four hurdles that limit execution of blue ocean strategy. They can do this fast and at low cost.”

241. “A closer look reveals that most plans don’t contain a strategy at all but rather a smorgasbord of tactics that individually make sense but collectively don’t add up to a unified, clear direction that sets a company apart.”

242. “The term blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider potential of market space that is vast, deep, and not yet explored.”

243. “Commitment, trust, and voluntary cooperation are not merely attitudes or behaviors. They are intangible capital.”

244. “The cost and risk of developing an innovative idea are borne by the initiator, not the follower.”

245. “The cost side of a company’s business model ensures that it creates a leap in value for itself in the form of profit—that is, the price of the offering minus the cost of production.”

246. “Every company wants one, yet few companies have one: a compelling strategy.”

247. “Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy”

248. Functional or emotional appeal: Is your brand more functional or emotional? Can you focus on both of these aspects when creating blue ocean marketing strategies for greater differentiation in your space?

249. “Salespeople on commission, for example, are seldom sensitive to the costs of the sales they produce.”

250. “To produce a high-performing and sustainable blue ocean strategy, you need to ask the following questions. Are your three strategy propositions aligned in pursuit of differentiation and low cost? Have you identified all the key stakeholders, including external ones on which the effective execution of your blue ocean strategy will depend? Have you developed compelling people propositions for each of these to ensure they are motivated and behind the execution of your new idea?”

251. “The best way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.”

252. What are the alternative industries to your industry? Why do customers trade across them? By focusing on the key factors that lead buyers to trade across alternative industries and eliminating or reducing everything else, you can create a blue ocean of new market space.

253. “In this sense, it is important to distinguish between value innovation as opposed to technology innovation and market pioneering.”

254. “Different form, same function. Many companies that create blue oceans attract customers from other industries who use a product or service that performs the same function or bears the same core utility as the new one but takes a very different physical form. In the case of Ford’s Model T, Ford looked to the horse-drawn carriage. The horse-drawn carriage had the same core utility as the car: transportation for individuals and families. But it had a very different form: a live animal versus a machine. Ford effectively converted the majority of noncustomers of the auto industry, namely customers of horse-drawn carriages, into customers of its own blue ocean by pricing its Model T against horse-drawn carriages and not the cars of other automakers. In the case of the school lunch catering industry, raising this question led to an interesting insight. Suddenly those parents who make their children’s lunches came into the equation. For many children, parents had the same function: making their child’s lunch. But they had a very different form: mom or dad versus a lunch line in the cafeteria. Different form and function, same objective. Some companies lure customers from even further away. Cirque du Soleil, for example, has diverted customers from a wide range of evening activities. Its growth came in part through drawing people away from other activities that differed in both form and function. For example, bars and restaurants have few physical features in common with a circus. They also serve a distinct function by providing conversational and gastronomical pleasure, a very different experience from the visual entertainment that a circus offers. Yet despite these differences in form and function, people have the same objective in undertaking these three activities: to enjoy a night out.”

255. “A blue ocean strategic move can create brand equity that lasts for decades”

256. “The key questions answered by tipping point leaders are as follows: What factors or acts exercise a disproportionately positive influence on breaking the status quo? On getting the maximum bang out of each buck of resources? On motivating key players to aggressively move forward with change? And on knocking down political roadblocks that often trip up even the best strategies? By single-mindedly focusing on points of disproportionate influence, tipping point leaders can topple the four hurdles that limit execution of blue ocean strategy. They can do this fast and at low cost. Let”

257. “Yet few leaders exploit the power of this rapid wake-up call. Rather, they do the opposite. They try to garner support based on a numbers case that lacks urgency and emotional impetus.”

258. “The cost side of a company’s business model ensures that it creates a leap in value for itself in the form of profit—that is, the price of the offering minus the cost of production. It is the combination of exceptional utility, strategic pricing, and target costing that allows companies to achieve value innovation—a”

259. “Shift from convergence to divergence”

260. “The creation of blue oceans is a product of strategy and as such is very much a product of managerial action.”

261. “Many technology innovators fail to create and capture blue oceans by confusing innovation with value innovation.”

262. “Blue ocean strategy pursues differentiation and low cost simultaneously by reconstructing market boundaries.”

263. “What is the chain of buyers in your industry? Which buyer group does your industry typically focus on? If you shifted the buyer group of your industry, how could you unlock new value?”

264. “people in the front line care as much about the proper process as those at the top.”

265. “innovative ideas will be profitable only if they are linked to what buyers are willing to pay for.”

266. “The Pivotal Lever: Disproportionate Influence Factors The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion. Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise.”

267. “Never use the competition as a benchmark”

268. “To maximize the size of their blue oceans, companies need to take a reverse course. Instead of concentrating on customers, they need to look to noncustomers. And instead of focusing on customer differences, they need to build on powerful commonalities in what buyers value.”

269. “To reach beyond existing demand, think noncustomers before customers; commonalities before differences; and desegmentation before pursuing finer segmentation.”

270. “Blue ocean shift is a systematic process to move your organization from cutthroat markets with bloody competition—what we think of as red oceans full of sharks—to wide-open blue oceans, or new markets devoid of competition, in a way that brings your people along.”

271. “With your blue ocean move chosen, and its market potential confirmed, it's time to formalize your business model.”

272. “A main cause of employee disengagement is poor leadership,”

273. “Organizations that pursue differentiation to stand apart from competitors tend to focus on what to offer more of. Those that pursue cost leadership tend to focus on what to offer less of. While both of these are viable strategic options, which a great many organizations currently pursue, both will keep you stuck in the red ocean, operating on your industry’s existing productivity frontier.”

274. “North America Industry Classification Standard (NAICS)”

275. “strategic planning should be more about collective wisdom building than top-down or bottom-up planning.”

276. “The theory that any idea that takes more than ten minutes to communicate is probably too complicated to be any good”

277. “Yet few leaders exploit the power of this rapid wake-up call. Rather, they do the opposite. They try to garner support based on a numbers case that lacks urgency and emotional impetus. Or they try to put forth the most exemplary case of their operational excellence to garner support. Although these alternatives may work, neither leads to tipping superiors’ cognitive hurdle as fast and stunningly as showing the worst. When”

278. “Blue ocean shift is a systematic process to move your organization from cutthroat markets with bloody competition – what we think of as red oceans full of sharks – to wide-open blue oceans, or new markets devoid of competition, in a way that brings your people along.”

279. “The more intense the competition is, the greater, on average, is the resulting customization of offerings. As companies compete to embrace customer preferences through finer segmentation, they often risk creating too-small target markets.”

280. “your offering needs to stand out as never before.”

281. “As Steve Jobs put it, “You tend to get told that the world is the way it is… But that’s a very limited [view]. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute you understand that you can poke life… that you can change it. You can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing—to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it.… And once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

282. “By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright.”

283. “we have observed a consistent pattern of strategic thinking behind the creation of new markets and industries, what we call blue ocean strategy.”

284. “We don’t have a theory of strategy creation”

285. “It is not enough to maximize the size of the blue ocean you are creating. You must profit from it to create a sustainable win-win outcome.”

286. “Partnering, however, provides a way for companies to secure needed capabilities fast and effectively while dropping their cost structure. It allows a company to leverage other companies’ expertise and economies of scale. Partnering includes closing gaps in capabilities through making small acquisitions when doing so is faster and cheaper, providing access to needed expertise that has already been mastered.”

287. “Unlike the practice of conventional technology innovators, value innovation is based on a win-win game among buyers, companies, and society.”

288. “Red oceans are when companies compete against competitors to gain a bigger market share without truly gaining a greater profit.”

289. “The core concept to blue ocean strategy is value innovation, which dials up value for buyers and simultaneously drives down costs for companies.”

290. “Every blue ocean will eventually be imitated and turn red”

291. “focus, divergence, and a compelling tagline. Cirque du Soleil’s strategy canvas allows us to graphically compare its strategic profile with those of its major competitors.”

292. “opportunity-maximizing and risk-minimizing principles driving the creation and capture of blue oceans, the odds will be lengthened against your blue ocean initiative.”

293. “Companies should strive to make the competition irrelevant by offering buyers a leap in value.”

294. “Shift from convergence to divergence.”

295. “Do you have one simple picture that captures your overall strategy, a picture that every manager understands and that puts everyone on the same page?”

296. “strategy is about confronting an opponent and fighting over a given piece of land that is both limited and constant.”

297. “Stakeholders need to know that their voices have been heard and that there will be no surprises.”

298. “the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. Value innovation, not innovation per se,”

299. “focus, divergence, and a compelling tagline. Cirque du Soleil’s strategy canvas allows us to graphically compare its strategic profile with those of its major competitors.”

300. “Every company wants one, yet few companies have one: a compelling strategy.”