Financial Reflections

Suppose you’re a small business owner, corporate mover-and-shaker, or an entrepreneur trying to get a start up off the ground.  Wouldn’t it be great to find the next big thing?  Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant promises to show you how to find just that — wide open blue waters you can hunt in, without trying to fight it out with all the other sharks in crowded markets.

One example in the book is Cirque du Soleil, a company that went into one of the oldest (and stalest) of industries – the circus — and did more than just dominate the existing competition, they created a new market, brought in new audience members and had a niche all to themselves.

Blue Ocean Strategy does a good job outlining the places Cirque got it right: stopping the highly criticized use of animals in performances, eliminating the sometimes confusing “rings” traditional circuses use, and removing people hawking concessions from the stands, among other things.

That’s all well and good, but I have a really have a hard time imagining that there was a board meeting where these decisions were made.  Maybe I’m wrong about that, but Circue’s history indicates one man’s determination to fulfill a vision, rather than “strategic” moves.  No matter how it happened, Cirque eventually became a roaring success.

So how does one create a blue ocean to hunt in?  Fortunately, Blue Ocean Strategy goes beyond case studies and tries to reverse-engineer the elements of success and hits on some key points anyone from a VP in charge of direction at a Fortune 500 company to a one-person operation can use.

Blue Ocean breaks down the method of thinking that can lead to market breakthroughs, with the simplest idea being that one should always look to find a new market, rather than only trying to fight for a portion of a small market.  That way, a whole new set of customers is found, rather than a small subset of existing costumers. Hint: if your major competitive advantage is to compete on price, you’re not heading into blue waters.

The real key here really isn’t if Cirque ever consciously decided to use animals in the performance, or was just too cash strapped at the beginning to even consider it.  The key in my mind was that they had the courage to chart a new course in the waters and the endurance to find that new ocean, and reap the benefits.

But when we try to find our way into blue waters, it’s good to have a compass at our command, and Blue Ocean Strategy seems to offer just that – a sound strategic guide to do more than just grab another company’s customers, a guide to create new ones and a new market all for ourselves.

You can buy Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant at Amazon.com.