Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 484

 

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim.

 

We observed that companies that break away from the competition pay little heed to matching or beating rivals or carving out a favorable competitive position. Their aim was not to outperform competitors. It was to offer a quantum leap in value that made the competition irrelevant. The focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors, drives companies to challenge all the factors an industry competes on and to not assume that just because the competition is doing something means it is connected to buyer value. 

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.

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 a disproportionate influence on performance. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, mounting a massive challenge is not about putting forth an equally massive response where performance gains are achieved by proportional investments in time and resources. Rather, it is about conserving resources and cutting time by focusing on identifying and then leveraging the factors of disproportionate influence in an organization.