Book: Blue Ocean Strategy

"Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant" uses a "red ocean vs. blue ocean" analogy to discuss the risks of head-to-head corporate competition (bloody red oceans) against the opportunities of differentiating your company or service such that your offerings are unique (blue oceans.)

The book walks through a few techniques for modeling your current market and exploring opportunities to reposition yourself. This analysis focuses heavily on identifying gaps between the parts of a service that businesses emphasize, and the parts that customers value. For example, if a current market has competitors battling over "quality of craftsmanship", thus raising prices and limited it's customer base, there may be a blue ocean strategy around simplifying manufacturing, reducing costs, and selling to a wider audience.

In many ways, the solutions the book promotes are often in alignment with the classic "user-centered design" and product management philosophies of listening to customers and focusing on providing customer value, rather then selling to a fictitious market. However, to get into a blue ocean, a company must react and reinvent itself if the customers it wants need a different offering.

A few quotes:

"Effective strategy should be about risk minimization and not risk taking."

"Innovative ideas will be profitable only if they are linked to what buyers are willing to pay for."

"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."

"If individuals are not treated as though their knowledge is valued, they will...not share their ideas and expertise; rather, they will hoard their best thinking and creative ideas, preventing new insights from seeing the light of day."

The concepts in the book aren't too hard to grasp, and unfortunately, this makes the book feel unnecessarily long. It's an easy read, but without a lot of substance. I do like how the Strategy Canvases were drawn (and I'm definitely going to play with that approach to modeling competition) so I did get some value out of it; But overall, the book isn't sitting too high on my recommended list.