Latest "Growth" Posts
Barack Obama may have stumbled upon Blue Ocean Strategy’s number-one principle: Reconstruct Market Boundaries. Is he achieving that with new voters? Is he getting non-voters to register? How is the Obama campaign – or Clinton’s (that’s Hillary’s not Bill’s!) or Huckabee for that matter – breaking through the boundaries and changing the competitive factors? The interesting question is would he make a good President? Of course, as we saw with President Bush, only time will tell.
Posted in Blue Ocean Strategy, Growth, Strategic Planning by Dr. Sarah Layton on February 15, 2008.
What is Microsoft thinking? Some think the acquisition of aQuantive by Microsoft might be Phase 1 of a Blue Ocean Strategy* and their hostile bid for Yahoo the Phase 2 of a Blue Ocean Strategy. While these acquisitions may increase share of the online advertising market and make them more competitive, competitors already exist and will be hot on their heels. They are simply buying more space in the already bloody red ocean of competition
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The acquisition of aQuantive seems a good perfect fit for Microsoft if they want to be more competitive in their current market, because its technology targets ads based on Web surfer’s habits. That opens large swaths of new customers to Microsoft, but the markets will soon be flooded with competitors after the same business.
Posted in Blue Ocean Strategy, Growth, Strategic Planning by Dr. Sarah Layton on February 13, 2008.
OK, so you are Mitt Romney or John McCain, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. If you want to make your competition irrelevant, how would you go about doing that?
Let’s look at the one of the principles of Blue Ocean Strategy and see if we can apply it to politics.
Principle #1 – reconstruct market boundaries. How would a candidate do that? There are about 223 Million adults over 18 in the US. Approximately 78% are registered voters but only about 35% are fairly regular voters. So if you were going to reconstruct market boundaries, BOS style, you would go to where the registered active voters aren’t, to the registered non-voters and the 22% non registered US citizens.
Posted in Growth by Dr. Sarah Layton on February 5, 2008.
Ask any CEO if s/he and her/his team know the factors of competition for their products and services and they will always tell me they do. When asked to define competitive factor, often there comes a “deer in the headlights” response. Further, when you get these same people in a room, divide them into teams and have each team come up with the competitive factors for their products and services, you may get very different answers.
Posted in Blue Ocean Strategy, Growth, Strategic Planning by Dr. Sarah Layton on November 27, 2007.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and a reminder that we need to stop, take a breath, and at least once a year, count our blessings instead of whining about all the perceived imperfections in our lives.
As a poor kid growing up in Miami, I was always taught to be thankful, and to show gratitude for anything anyone did for me or gave to me. We take for granted so much in our lives. It is only when we lose something, like our health, that we realize how blessed we were when we had good health.
Posted in Governance, Growth, Organizational Strategy, Strategic Planning by Dr. Sarah Layton on November 21, 2007.
It takes creative thinking today and new strategy tools to move away from the competitive fray and into a blue ocean of value innovation where the revenue and profits are higher, the markets are unserved and the competition is nowhere in sight.
But what if you are a CEO raring to go with, say the Blue Ocean Strategy tools, ready to see if there is a Blue Ocean out there, or at least to make your bloody red ocean less competitive, and your team seems resistant, either actively or passively, to a move toward a new strategy that might advance the company past its current state of bloody competitive moves? Under those conditions, a CEO might be inclined to give up on innovation, feeling that maybe s/he is just too “out there” for his/her business/industry.
Posted in Governance, Growth, Organizational Strategy, Strategic Planning by Dr. Sarah Layton on November 5, 2007.
Retired Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, Norm Augustine said that in this global economy, we only have two options… either innovate or evaporate.
The view from here says that many companies are on the path toward evaporation. How many CEOs actually know how to innovate; know a process that would help them innovate and gain sustainable advantage over a long period of time?
Let’s look at what innovation actually is. Webster tells us that “to innovate” means to do something in a new way. It is a simple definition. Most of the time we look at our competitors first, see what they are doing and then try to do something different or better, or prettier, or less costly….in other words…we try to innovate. We ask our customers what they want. The reality is they want more for less. That doesn’t help us do anything but erode our margins.
Unfortunately, most of the time, we have innovated little, our competitors are right behind us and we have received little or no advantage from the action we took. The reality is that most companies don’t take the time to determine if the innovative idea is valuable to our customers. Many customers just shake their heads in disbelief at what we do.
In the 20+ years I have been helping clients formulate strategy and do strategic planning, until now, there has never been a step-by-step method for innovating in such a way that it cannot be duplicated for a very long time. It is very exciting to finally have the tools necessary to help my clients get really innovative, if they want to.
Prior to this posting, the summary/review of the book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne was posted. If you would like a copy emailed, please let me know. You can contact me at info@corporatestrategy.com.
Permanent link to this post (320 words, estimated 1:17 mins reading time)
Posted in Blue Ocean Strategy, Governance, Growth, Organizational Strategy, Strategic Planning by Dr. Sarah Layton on October 29, 2007.
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY BOOK SUMMARY AND REVIEWBlue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and
Make the Competition Irrelevant
by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Reviewed by Dr. Sarah Layton
Dr. Sarah Layton (mailto:info@corporatestrategy.com; http://www.corporatestrategy.com/) is Managing Partner of Corporate Strategy Institute, Orlando, Florida. She is qualified by the Blue Ocean Strategy Initiative Center – London, in Blue Ocean Strategy concepts, tools and frameworks and specializes in helping organizations create their Blue Ocean Strategy future.
Posted in Blue Ocean Strategy, Governance, Growth, Organizational Strategy, Strategic Planning by Dr. Sarah Layton on October 21, 2007.
