Rene Mauborgne, Kim Chan Blue Ocean Strategy. How to Find or Create a Market Free from Other Players (Advanced Edition)

The book by Chan Kim and Rene Mauborgne is devoted to a serious topic - business strategy. The topic seems very voluminous, deep and complex, but the authors of this book were able to write about it in such a way that many points become clear. The book presents information in a structured manner, with explanations and examples that inspire and provide a more complete understanding.

Every entrepreneur would like to work in ideal conditions, when his product is in demand, costs are minimal, and there are no competitors. But this rarely happens. And mostly due to the fact that people don’t even try to look at the situation more broadly and find other options. They simply develop what already exists, strive to earn more, or reduce the price a little more, or attract a little more customers. Such conditions are usually called the red ocean, in which everyone is ready to tear apart all competitors. The authors of the book write that you can do your own research and find a blue ocean for yourself in which there will be no such problems.

The book offers practical tools that will help you understand what a business should be like so that there is no competition and minimal costs. You need to find your own path that no one has walked before. Here are the characteristics of a good strategy and what important actions need to be taken. The second part is devoted to clear practical recommendations and examples from the experience of other companies. Readers will be able to learn how to evaluate their own idea to see if it can be used to build a successful business. The third part talks about all the difficulties that may arise and gives advice. This book can be distinguished among similar books because it contains a lot of useful and practically applicable information.

On our website you can download the book "Blue Ocean Strategy. How to find or create a market free from other players" by Chan Kim and Rene Mauborgne for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy a book in the online store.

You have in your hands the book “Blue Ocean Strategy” - the most famous book on strategy, translated into 40 languages ​​of the world. It is based on a simple idea. It is better to find your blue ocean than to remain in the red ocean with fierce competition that is exhausting all the players in this industry. Dozens of examples and proposed methodology will help you find your blue ocean.

What is the book “Blue Ocean Strategy” about?

We are used to thinking that competition is a symbol of healthy business. However, every year the competition becomes more and more intense, and the struggle for the sympathy of the consumer (and his wallet) becomes more and more bloody. The business ocean has turned red and it is becoming increasingly difficult to survive in it.

The authors of “Strategy” are sure that we need to step aside and come up with something completely new. And then, in the calm waters of the Blue Ocean, your business will achieve the desired growth. Chan Kim and Mauborgne offer detailed instructions on how to lift a company out of competitive stress and create an entirely new business model.

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Blue ocean strategy. How to find or create a market free from other players
Rene Mauborgne, Kim Chan
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Why we decided to publish this book

Translated into 40 languages ​​and with more than 2 million copies in print, the book has twice been named one of the top ten business books of the decade, won Best Business Book of the Year 2005 at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and received numerous other awards from respected business publications. Over the 7 years since its publication, the book has not left the Top 10 best business books on Amazon.com and has collected more than 250 positive reviews there. It's time to introduce the domestic reader to one of the best business books of our time.

Who is this book for?

For those who do not want to fish in muddy scarlet water, those who are looking for an ocean of new opportunities (for example, fittings STO TsKTI 462.05-2009). This is a book for the true business leaders of the future.

Book feature

“Blue Ocean Strategy” is not just a book, but a whole philosophy of success. There is even a business institute of the same name.

From the authors

We've learned the hard way that people, like corporations, sometimes do smart things and sometimes not so much. To achieve greater success, we need to understand exactly how we managed to achieve a positive result, and figure out how to systematically reproduce it. This is what we call smart strategic moves, and as we have established, the strategic move to create blue oceans is paramount.

Blue ocean strategy aims to encourage companies to break out of the red ocean of competition by creating a market niche for themselves where they do not have to fear competitors. The blue ocean strategy suggests refusing to share existing - and often decreasing - demand with others, while constantly looking back at competitors. Instead, she suggests dedicating yourself to creating new, growing demand and moving away from competition.

The book not only encourages companies to take this step, but also explains what needs to be done to achieve this. We first give you a set of analytical tools and perspectives that show you what systematic actions to take along the proposed path, and then we look at the principles that define blue ocean strategy and distinguish it from strategic approaches that are based on competition.

About the authors

Rene Mauborgne- Professor of Strategy at INSEAD, Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, ranked second on the Thinkers50 list in 2011 (the only woman to rise that high on the list).

Chan Kim- Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, author of publications on management theory and strategy, ranked second on the Thinkers50 list in 2011.

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About the book

about the author
W. Chan Kim is the Bruce D. Henderson Professor and Chair of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD, Boston Consulting Group. One of the world's most famous business consultants. Member of the Board of Directors of Value...

About the book
An expanded and updated edition of the book, which became a bestseller on 5 continents and translated into 43 languages.

We are used to thinking that competition is a symbol of healthy business. However, every year the competition becomes more and more intense, and the struggle for the sympathy of the consumer (and his wallet) becomes more and more bloody. The business ocean has turned red and it is becoming increasingly difficult to survive in it.

The authors of “Strategy” are confident that we need to step aside and come up with something completely new. And then, in the calm waters of the Blue Ocean, your business will achieve the desired growth. Chan Kim and Mauborgne offer detailed instructions on how to lift a company out of competitive stress and create an entirely new business model.

about the author
W. Chan Kim is the Bruce D. Henderson Professor and Chair of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD, Boston Consulting Group. One of the world's most famous business consultants. Member of the board of directors of the Value Innovation Action Tank in Singapore.

Chan Kim has been an advisor to many international corporations around the world. Now Professor Kim is a member of the European Union with advisory functions. Author of a number of articles on the management of multinational corporations. His work has been published by almost every reputable business magazine. One of the sensations was Professor Kim's articles on management strategies, which were published by the Harvard Business Review. More than half a million copies were purchased.

Professor Kim received an award from the Academy of International Business and the Eldridge Haynes Memorial Foundation for the best original work in the field of international business.

Author of the classic business hit (together with Rene Mauborgne) "Blue Ocean Strategy", which is included in the "MYTH Golden Library". The book has been translated into 40 languages ​​and sold more than two million copies.

Rene Mauborgne is an honorary fellow at INSEAD, professor of strategy and management at INSEAD, and a member of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Author of a number of articles devoted to management in international corporations.
8th edition, revised and expanded

Title: Blue Ocean Strategy. How to find or create a market free from other players
Author: Rene Mauborgne, Kim Chan
Year: 2005
Genre: Job search, career, Marketing, PR, advertising, Foreign business literature

About the book “Blue Ocean Strategy. How to find or create a market free from other players" Rene Mauborgne, Kim Chan

"Blue Ocean Strategy. How to Find or Create a Market Free from Other Players by Rene Mauborgne and Kim Chan is a popular book about the rules of doing business. It offers a unique model for creating and developing startups.

Written in simple, lively language, this book has been translated into 40 languages ​​and has sold over 2 million copies. Moreover, it was twice included in the top ten best business books of the decade. For several years since its publication, this work has not left the Top 10 best business publications on Amazon.com.

“Blue Ocean Strategy...” is not just a guide to doing business. This is a unique philosophy that offers a completely different approach to the process of doing business.

Today, many works say that in order to create a successful project, it is necessary to go beyond the market. However, only the Blue Ocean Strategy explains how to achieve this breakthrough.

So, the book “Blue Ocean Strategy. How to Find or Create a Market Free of Other Players by René Mauborgne and Kim Chan is actually divided into two parts. The first introduces the reader to the very concepts of “blue” and “scarlet” oceans. The authors believe that modern business is built in a “red ocean,” that is, in an environment overflowing with competition. Here, each new participant tries to “bleed” a fellow competitor.

While the “blue ocean” is a place where there is no competition. In fact, every entrepreneur who does not want to fight with competitors must open his “blue ocean”. In addition, this half of the work will tell you how to create your own unique strategy, which will lead to success in the future.

The second part of the book will talk about how you can avoid failure. The fact is that quite often the incompetent execution of tasks leads to serious problems. This half of the book is devoted to effective personnel management.

The book “Blue Ocean Strategy. How to find or create a market free from other players" from Rene Mauborgne and Kim Chan is distinguished from similar ones by several important points: a living language, systematization of the experience of different, dissimilar companies, creative motivation for entrepreneurs, the commercial side of the issue is described in detail.

On our website about books, you can download the site for free or read online the book “Blue Ocean Strategy. How to find or create a market free from other players" by Rene Mauborgne, Kim Chan in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.

Quotes from the book “Blue Ocean Strategy. How to find or create a market free from other players" Rene Mauborgne, Kim Chan

A company should never outsource its own eyes.

The key to defeating opponents, or demons, is to know all the likely directions of attack and be able to construct counterarguments backed by irrefutable data and logic.

Louis Pasteur "Fate favors only prepared minds"

However, while emphasizing early movers, senior management must recognize that early adopters, despite their low growth potential, are often the company's current cash generators. Pioneers, on the other hand, have the greatest growth potential but require a significant investment of cash during the initial phase of growth and expansion.

By applying the four action model to your industry's strategy canvas, you gain a whole new perspective on old conventional wisdom.

Great artists do not paint their paintings from the words of other people or even from photographs, considering it necessary to see nature with one’s own eyes. The same is true of great strategists.

The world market was oversaturated with wine, but producers could barely keep up with demand.

A blue ocean was created, instead of offering wine as wine, Casella Wines created a party drink that was suitable for everyone - beer lovers, cocktail lovers and lovers of other non-wine drinks.

Obviously, the main task of senior management is to manage their portfolio of businesses in a way that ensures a reasonable balance between profitable growth and cash flow at any given time.

No one can “personally verify” anything for you.

Download the book “Blue Ocean Strategy” for free. How to find or create a market free from other players" Rene Mauborgne, Kim Chan

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Current page: 1 (book has 19 pages in total) [available reading passage: 4 pages]

Rene Mauborgne, Kim Chan

Blue ocean strategy. How to find or create a market free from other players

W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne

Blue Ocean Strategy

How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

Published with permission from Harvard Business Review Press and the literary agency of Alexander Korzhenevsky

Legal support for the publishing house is provided by the Vegas-Lex law firm.

© Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, 2005

© Translation into Russian, publication in Russian, design. Mann, Ivanov and Ferber LLC, 2014

* * *

This book is well complemented by:

Search for a business model

How to save a startup by changing the plan in time

John Mullins and Randy Komisar

Second space

The art of management and future strategy

Geoffrey Moore

Momentum effect

How to survive in the "blue ocean"

Jean-Claude Laresh

To friends and family who fill our worlds with meaning

Preface to the edition in Russian

We are very pleased that Blue Ocean Strategy has been translated into Russian and the ideas presented in this book have become available to a Russian-speaking audience. Once we had a chance to visit Russia. This happened at the end of the 80s, when we arrived in Leningrad, as present-day St. Petersburg was still called in those years. We were surprised by the entrepreneurial spirit of those we met then, the inherent energy and desire of Russians to create new economic opportunities.

The question is: how can those doing business in Russia today direct all their energy and intelligence to break out of the competition and create blue oceans of market space in which there is no room for competition? How can Russian business create products and services that provide companies with rapid profitable growth and are available to mass buyers not only in Russia, but also in other countries of the world?

As global competition grows fiercer and trade barriers crumble, finding answers to these questions is more important than ever. The book “Blue Ocean Strategy” not only presents the concept itself, but also provides analytical tools and techniques that every Russian company can apply in any industry - from the production of industrial products, the creation of consumer goods, the provision of services, retail trade, restaurant services and to circus performances - in order to solve this complex problem. Through our research over the past fifteen years, we have been able to identify clear strategic models for creating blue oceans that allow us to break out of the vicious circle of competitive wars.

We invite you to read this book and apply its ideas and concepts in practice: in your company, in your enterprise. Blue oceans of opportunity lie all around us. There is no need to compete when you can use your energy to create.

Use the Blue Ocean Strategy to pave the way to new, high-profit markets where everyone wins: companies, consumers and society as a whole. We hope that this book will help the cause of creating a prosperous Russian economy.

Preface

This book is dedicated to friendship, loyalty and faith in each other. It was through friendship and faith that we embarked on a journey, researching the ideas presented in this book, and then writing the book itself.

We met twenty years ago in a classroom - one of us was then a professor, and the other was a student. And since then we have been working together, inspiring and supporting each other. This book is a victory not of an idea, but of friendship, which means more to us than any idea from the world of business. Friendship has made our lives richer and our worlds more beautiful. None of us were alone.

There are no easy journeys; There is no friendship filled only with laughter. However, we greeted every day of our journey with joy, because we strived for knowledge and improvement. We believed passionately in the ideas expressed in the book. These ideas are not for those who only dream of surviving. We were never interested in survival. If your thoughts are limited only to him, do not read further. However, if you want to take a different path, start a company and use it to build a future where customers, employees, shareholders and society all benefit, read on.

We don't promise you that it will be easy, but this path is worth considering.

The results of our research confirmed that there are no companies that have not experienced failure, just as there is no ever-successful industry. We've learned the hard way that people, like corporations, sometimes do smart things and sometimes don't. To achieve greater success, we need to understand exactly how we managed to achieve a positive result, and figure out how to systematically reproduce it. This is what we call smart strategic moves, and as we have established, the strategic move to create blue oceans is paramount. Blue Ocean Strategy aims to encourage companies to break out of the red ocean of competition by creating a market niche for themselves where they do not have to fear competitors. The blue ocean strategy suggests refusing to share existing - and often decreasing - demand with others, while constantly looking back at competitors. Instead, she suggests dedicating yourself to creating new, growing demand and moving away from competition. The book not only encourages companies to take this step, but also explains what needs to be done to achieve this. We first give you a set of analytical tools and perspectives that show you what systematic actions to take along the proposed path, and then we look at the principles that define blue ocean strategy and distinguish it from strategic approaches that are based on competition.

Our goal is to formulate and implement a blue ocean strategy, making it as systematic and effective as competition in the red waters of the market we already know is systematic and effective. Only then will companies be able to take a thoughtful and responsible approach to creating blue oceans, maximizing their opportunities and minimizing risk. No company - regardless of size or age - can afford to become a riverboat gambler. It can't and shouldn't.

This book is the culmination of fifteen years of research and study of data over the past hundred plus years. It was preceded by a series of articles published in the Harvard Business Review and academic publications devoted to various aspects of this topic. The ideas, models and tools presented in the book have been tested and refined in practice for many years in various corporations in Europe, the United States and Asia. The book builds on and develops this work, integrating all these ideas into an overall framework. It covers not only the analytical aspects that underlie blue ocean strategy, but also the equally important issues related to people, how to set the organization and its employees on this path, how to create in them the desire to bring these ideas to life. We especially emphasize the importance of understanding how to achieve trust and loyalty, as well as intellectual and emotional recognition. Moreover, this understanding underlies the strategy itself.

Blue ocean opportunities have always been there, just reach out. As they opened, the market universe expanded. We believe that this expansion is the key to growth. However, both in theory and in practice, people sometimes do not understand how to systematically create blue oceans and take control over them. We invite you to read this book and discover how you can become a driving force in expanding your market space.

Part one

Blue Ocean Strategy

Creating Blue Oceans

Former accordionist, acrobat and fire eater Guy Laliberte is now the head of Cirque du Soleil, one of Canada's largest cultural exporters. Created in 1984 by a group of street actors, the company has already brought its productions to nearly forty million people in ninety cities around the world. In less than twenty years of its existence, Cirque du Soleil began to generate profits that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey - the world champions of the circus industry - managed to achieve only more than a hundred years after their appearance.

This rapid growth is also remarkable because it occurred not in an attractive industry, but in a declining one, where traditional strategic analysis pointed to limited growth opportunities. The power of suppliers in the form of star performers was as strong as the power of consumers. Alternative forms of entertainment - from various city shows and sporting events to home entertainment - increasingly took the circus industry into the shadows. Children begged their parents for money for game consoles, and not for a ticket to a traveling circus performance. This is partly why the circus industry was constantly losing customers and, as a result, revenue and income were falling. In addition, animal rights groups increasingly opposed the participation of animals in circus performances. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey set the tone, and competing small circuses imitated them, creating their own lower-class versions. In general, from the point of view of competitive strategy, the circus industry looked unattractive.

Another interesting aspect of Cirque du Soleil's success was that it did not win by luring away customers from the fading circus industry, which historically catered to children. Cirque du Soleil did not compete with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Instead, the company created a new, unoccupied part of the market, free from competitors. It was aimed at a completely new group of consumers: adults and corporate clients who were willing to pay several times more than a ticket to a regular circus in order to see a new, unprecedented performance. The name of one of Cirque du Soleil's first projects said it all: “We are reinventing the circus.”

New market space

Cirque du Soleil succeeded because it realized that in order to win in the future, companies had to stop competing with each other. The only way to beat the competition is to stop try win.

To understand what Cirque du Soleil has achieved, imagine a market universe made up of two oceans: red and blue. Red oceans symbolize all currently existing industries. This is the part of the market we know. Blue oceans represent all industries that do not yet exist today. These are unknown areas of the market.

In red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and agreed upon, and the rules of the competitive game are known to everyone (1). Here, companies try to outperform their rivals in order to capture most of the existing demand. As the market gets tighter, there are fewer opportunities for growth and profit. Products turn into consumer goods, and ruthless competitors cut each other's throats, flooding the red ocean with blood. Blue oceans, on the other hand, represent untapped areas of the market, require creativity and provide opportunities for growth and high profits. While some blue oceans are created outside of established industry boundaries, most are created within red oceans, pushing pre-existing industry boundaries—as Cirque du Soleil did. In blue oceans, competition is not a threat to anyone, since the rules of the game have yet to be established.

In red oceans, the most important thing is always the ability to swim, overtaking your competitors. Red oceans will never lose their significance and will remain a fact of business life. However, when supply begins to exceed demand across a wide range of industries, fighting for market share, while necessary, is no longer sufficient to maintain sustainable growth (2) . Companies need to look beyond competition. To generate new profits and opportunities for further development, they need to create blue oceans.

Alas, there are practically no maps of blue oceans. All strategic approaches of the last twenty-five years have been focused primarily on competition in red oceans (3). As a result, we have a good understanding of how to navigate competitive waters, from analyzing the underlying economic structure of an industry, choosing a strategic position - low cost, differentiation or focus - and all the way to competitive benchmarking. The debate about blue oceans continues unabated (4). However, there are very few practical guidelines for creating such oceans. Without appropriate analytical tools and developed principles for effective risk management, the creation of blue oceans remains something of a dream and appears to managers as an overly risky strategy. This book gives you just such practical frameworks and analytical tools for systematically searching for and conquering blue oceans.

Blue oceans have always been created

Although the term blue oceans Quite new, you can’t say the same about the oceans themselves. They are an integral part of the business world of the past and present. Look at the world a century ago and ask yourself: How many of today's industries were unknown back then? The answer is that foundational industries such as automobiles, recording, aviation, oil refining, healthcare, and management consulting were unheard of and, at best, nascent. Now let's move the needle back just thirty years. Again, we can list a myriad of multi-billion dollar industries such as investment funds, cell phones, gas power plants, biotechnology, discount retailing, mail order courier services, minivans, snowboards, coffee bars and home video recorders - and that's not all. All. Just three decades ago, none of these industries really existed.

Now let's set the clock forward twenty or fifty years and ask ourselves: how many industries unknown today will appear then? If, based on historical experience, it is possible to predict the future, the answer is clear - there will be a lot of them.

The truth is: industries never stand still. They are constantly evolving. Their work improves, markets grow, and players come and go. It is clear from the lessons of history that we have a seriously underappreciated ability to create new industries and reinvent existing ones. Even the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system proposed by the U.S. Census gave way to the North America Industry Classification Standard (NAICS) system in 1997. Under the new system, the ten industrial sectors proposed by the SIC were turned into twenty to reflect emerging industries (5) . For example, the services sector of the old system has now been transformed into seven business sectors, ranging from information technology to health care, and a social welfare sector has also emerged (6). Considering that these systems are created for the purposes of standardization and continuity, such changes indicate how significant the expansion of blue oceans has been.

However, until now, the main emphasis in strategic thinking has been on competition-related red ocean strategies. This is partly because corporate strategy is heavily influenced by its progenitor, military strategy. The language of strategy itself is heavily laden with military terms: the Chief Executive Officers are in the Headquarters, and the Troops of employees are in the Front Line. The strategy described in these terms is aimed at confronting the enemy and fighting for a limited piece of land of a strictly defined size (7). Unlike war, however, industrial history shows that the market universe was never strictly limited; on the contrary, blue oceans were constantly created in it. Thus, to focus on the red ocean was to accept the fundamental factors of war (limited space and the need to defeat the enemy in order to survive) and to deny the obvious advantage of the business world: the possibility of creating a unique market space where there will be no competitors.

Impact of blue oceans

In a study of the business ventures of 108 organizations, we attempted to quantify the impact of blue oceans on profits and revenues (Figure 1.1). It turned out that 86% of the initiatives were linear expansion, that is, they implied gradual improvements in the existing market space - within the red oceans. They accounted for only 62% of total income and 39% of total profit. The remaining 14% of initiatives were aimed at creating blue oceans. They generated 38 and 61% respectively. If we consider that business ventures included all investments in the creation of red and blue oceans (regardless of the amount of income and profit they generated, including completely unsuccessful projects), then the benefits of creating a blue ocean are obvious. While we do not have data on the success rate of red and blue ocean initiatives, the global differences in their effectiveness outlined above speak for themselves.

Rice. 1.1. Impact of Blue Ocean Creation on Growth and Profits

Growing need for blue oceans

There are several driving forces behind the growing need to create blue oceans. Advances in technology have greatly increased manufacturing productivity and enabled suppliers to produce unprecedented volumes of products and services. The result is that in various industries, supply increasingly exceeds demand (8). The situation is aggravated by globalization trends. As borders between countries and regions blur and information about products and prices spreads instantly throughout the world, niche markets and monopoly areas continue to disappear (9) . Supply is increasing due to global competition, but there is no evidence of demand growth around the world, with statistics even indicating a decline in the number of participants in many developed markets (10) .

The result has been the increasing commodification of goods and services, intensifying price wars and declining profits. Recent studies of large US brands within one industry have confirmed this trend (11) . Research shows that brands across major product and service categories are becoming increasingly similar, and as their similarity increases, people are increasingly making their choices based on price (12). Unlike in the past, the consumer no longer intends to wash exclusively with Tide. And he won't cling to Colgate if they announce a sale on Cross pasta at reduced prices, and vice versa. In manufacturer-clogged areas, distinguishing brands becomes increasingly difficult during both economic booms and downturns.

All this means that the business environment that gave rise to most strategic and managerial approaches in the 20th century is gradually disappearing. There is more blood in the red oceans, and managers should pay more attention to the blue oceans than those to which the entire host of current managers are so accustomed.

From company and industry to strategic step

How can a company escape from the red ocean of fierce competition? How can she create a blue ocean? Is there a systematic approach that can ensure the company achieves this goal and thereby maintains high performance?

When we began searching for an answer, our first step was to define a basic unit of analysis for our research. To understand where high performance comes from, business literature typically uses the company as the basic unit of analysis. People continue to be amazed by how companies achieve significant growth and profitability with a sophisticated set of strategic, operational and organizational characteristics. However, we asked another question: Are there long-lived “exceptional” or “visionary” companies that consistently outperform the market and create blue oceans time and time again?

Take, for example, the books In Search of Excellence and Built to Last. The bestseller In Search of Excellence was published twenty years ago. However, two years after its publication, some of the companies studied by the author - Atari, Cheseborough-Pond's, Data General, Fluor, National Semiconductor - have sunk into oblivion. According to Managingonthe Edge, two-thirds of the exemplary companies listed in the book lost their position as industry leaders within five years of publication (13).

Built to Last continued the same theme. In it, the author sought to identify “the successful habits of companies that had vision” and had a long history of high-performance activities behind them. However, to avoid the mistakes made in the book In Search of Excellence, the period of study in the book Built to Last was extended to the size of the company's life cycle and only companies that had already existed for at least forty years were analyzed. Built to Last was also a bestseller.

However, once again, upon closer examination, some of the flaws in the companies discussed in the book that had vision came to light. As the book Creative Destruction shows, much of the success that Built to Last attributed to model companies was the result of industry-wide activity rather than the work of the companies themselves (14). For example, Hewlett-Packard (HP) met the criteria set out in the book Built to Last because it was ahead of the market for a long time. In practice, at the same time as HP, the entire computer components industry was ahead of the entire market. In fact, HP didn't even outperform all of its competitors within the industry. Drawing attention to this and other examples, the authors of the book “Creative Destruction” asked the question: were there ever any “visionary” companies that were ahead of the market for a long time? In addition, we all had the opportunity to observe the stagnation or decline in the activities of Japanese companies, which in their heyday, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, enjoyed the fame of “revolutionary” strategists.

If there are no perpetually high-performing companies, and if the same company alternates between great success and decline, the company is not a suitable unit of analysis for exploring the sources of high performance and blue oceans.

As discussed above, history also shows that industries have never stopped emerging and expanding and that industry conditions and boundaries are fluid; they are set by individual entities. Companies do not need to butt heads in the space of a particular industry; Cirque du Soleil created a new market space in the entertainment sector and achieved strong earnings growth as a result. It turns out that neither the company nor the industry can be considered the optimal unit of analysis for the sources of profitable growth.

In full accordance with this, our research has shown that it is the “strategic move” - and not the “company” or the “industry” - that is the appropriate unit to explain the creation of blue oceans and the permanent high-performance activities of companies. A strategic move is a set of management actions and decisions associated with the development of a major business proposition that creates a new market. For example, Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2001 and lost its independence. As a result, many labeled the company a failure. But that doesn't invalidate the blue-ocean strategic move Compaq has made to shape the server industry. These strategic moves not only formed part of the company's strong comeback in the mid-nineties, but also paved the way for a new multibillion-dollar computer market.

Appendix A, Historical Essay on the Blue Ocean Pattern, provides a concise overview of the history of three emblematic US industries based on our database: Automotive, the way we get to work; computer - what we use at work; the film industry - where we go to have fun after work. As shown in Appendix A, there are no consistently successful companies or industries. However, the strategic moves that led to the creation of blue oceans and new trajectories of powerful profit growth are strikingly similar.

The strategic moves we're talking about—moves to create products and services that open up and conquer new market spaces with soaring demand—are compelling stories of profitable growth, stories that make us think about the opportunities missed by those companies stuck in scarlet oceans. We framed our research around these strategic steps to understand how blue oceans are created and company performance is achieved. We examined more than one hundred and fifty strategic moves made from 1880 to 2000 in more than thirty industries, and carefully examined the business players involved in each of these events. The industries ranged from hotels, film, retail, airlines, energy, computers, broadcasting and construction to automobiles and steel. We analyzed not only the winners who managed to create blue oceans, but also their less successful competitors.

Both within each specific strategic move and across the entirety of strategic moves, we looked for similarities within the group that created the blue oceans and among the less fortunate players stuck in the red ocean. We also looked for differences that exist in these two groups. In our search, we tried to identify the common factors that led to the creation of blue oceans, as well as the key characteristics that distinguish the winners from the mere survivors and losers adrift in the red ocean.

As a result, after examining more than thirty industries, we are convinced that neither industry characteristics nor organizational characteristics can explain the differences that exist between the two groups. In assessing the variables of industry, organization, and strategy, we found that blue oceans have been created and conquered by both small and large companies, young and old managers, companies in attractive and unattractive industries, newcomers and real mastodons, private and state-owned companies, representatives of low-tech and high-tech industries, as well as companies of a wide variety of national origins.

During the analysis, we did not find a single permanently flawless company or industry. However, behind the apparent diversity of success stories, it was still possible to find a consistent and common set of strategic steps to create and conquer blue oceans. Was it Ford in 1908 with its Model T; GM, which launched sleek cars with emotional appeal in 1924; CNN, which introduced real-time news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in 1980; Whether it's Compaq, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, or Cirque du Soleil, any of the other blue ocean experiences we've studied in our research, no matter the industry, the approach to blue ocean strategy has always been similar. Our research also covered famous strategic moves that led to radical changes in the public sector. And here we found a stunningly similar pattern of actions.