Blue Ocean Classics

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne changed the field of strategy and the language of business forever with their path-breaking blue ocean strategy, a new model for creating uncontested markets that unlock all new demand and growth. This book brings together three of their classic Harvard Business Review articles that upend traditional thinking for creating and capturing lasting value.

In Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne introduce the idea of blue oceans, previously unknown market spaces where demand is created rather than fought over, and the opportunities for profitable growth are wide and untainted. The article highlights the distinctive differences between market-competing and market-creating strategy and what it takes to create the new markets of tomorrow.

Red Ocean Traps shows that managers’ mental models - ingrained assumptions about the way the world works - undermine attempts to make market-creating strategic moves that unlock blue oceans. Kim and Mauborgne provide a framework that reveals the assumptions managers make in creating new markets that keep their efforts tethered to existing overcrowded industries (red oceans).

In Blue Ocean Leadership, the authors address what is perhaps the greatest challenge of leadership: closing the gulf between the potential and the realized talent and energy of employees. They outline an approach to uncovering which leadership acts and activities will inspire employees, and a process for getting managers to start doing them.