 When Blue Ocean Strategy debuted in 2005, it took the popular business strategy world by storm (a tsunami, I presume.) The authors, professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne at INSEAD, laid out a new way to look at strategy as either competing in well-defined but highly competitive (and therefore bloody) red oceans, or creating new markets and customers without competition, called blue oceans. In the age of innovation and entrepreneurship, the book was a hit. This past September, 2017, the authors published their follow-up entitled Blue Ocean Shift. The new book does a nice job positioning the approach on Michael Porter’s classic productivity frontier, a curve depicting the trade-off between value differentiation and cost within a market. The shift is then defined as shifting Porter’s curve out and away from the existing curve, unlocking new market demand. The shift is also described in terms of changing the focus of strategy from competing to creating. Aside from the new foundation, I found little in the book to really be new. Granted, the authors state that the purpose of the follow-up is to capture lessons learned over the last decade and to provide a better roadmap for applying the approach. To that end, they work through five steps for successfully applying Blue Ocean strategy in the field: Get Started, Understand Where You Are Now, Imagine Where You Could Be, Find How You Get There, and Make Your Move. However, within these steps, the same constructs and tools from the original work are applied: the strategy canvas, eliminate-reduce-raise-create grid, six paths framework, etc. The new book does provide a variety of new examples, such as citizenM affordable luxury hotels and the Malaysian government’s National Blue Ocean Strategy (NBOS) Summit efforts. For Blue Ocean fans or practitioners, I place Blue Ocean Shift in the must-buy category. Yes, when needed for reference, I’ll be reaching for the new volume. For those who choose to pass on it, rest assured the basic principles and tools from the original book remain the same.
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