W. Chan Kim - Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

H ELP! MY OCEAN IS TURNING RED captures the sentiment echoed so frequently by managers around the world. More and more people, whether managers of companies, heads of nonprofits, or leaders of government, find themselves up against an ocean of bloody competition and want to get out. Maybe your business is seeing its margins shrink. Maybe competition is getting more intense, driving commoditization of your offering and rising costs. Maybe you know you are going to announce that salary increases wont be coming. Thats not a situation any one of us wants to face. And yet thats a situation that so many do face.

How can you address this challenge? The lessons, tools, and frameworks of Blue Ocean Strategy will help you to meet this challenge, whatever industry or economic sector you are in. It shows how you can get out of a red ocean of bloody competition and into a blue ocean of uncontested market space characterized by new demand and strong profitable growth.

When we wrote Blue Ocean Strategy , we used the metaphor of red and blue oceans because red oceans seemed to capture the reality that organizations increasingly face, while blue oceans captured the endless possibility that organizations could create, as industry history has borne out since its inception. Today, ten years later, more than 3.5 million copies of the book have been sold. It has become a bestseller across five continents. It has been translated into a record-breaking forty-three languages. And the term blue ocean has entered the business vernacular. Over four thousand articles and blog posts on blue ocean strategy have come out, with new articles continuing to appear daily worldwide.

The stories they contain are fascinating. There are articles from small business owners and individuals across the globe that discuss how the book fundamentally changed their perspectives on life and took their professional successes to all new levels. In other articles, executives speak of how blue ocean strategy provided the insight to take their business out of the red ocean and create all new demand. And yet other articles detail how government leaders have applied blue ocean strategy to achieve high impact at low cost with rapid execution in areas of social importance ranging from enhancing the quality of rural and urban lives, to strengthening internal and external securities, to breaking down ministerial and regional silos.

As we have reached out to organizations that have applied the ideas and have worked with many directly since the publication of the original edition of Blue Ocean Strategy , we have learned a lot by watching the journey people have made with these ideas. Their most pressing questions in executing their blue ocean strategies are: How do we align all of our activities around our blue ocean strategy? What do we do when our blue ocean has become red? How can we avoid the strong gravitational pulls of red ocean thinkingwe call them red ocean trapseven as were pursuing a blue ocean strategy? These are the very questions that have motivated this expanded edition. In this new preface, we first outline whats new here. We then briefly summarize the key points that define and distinguish blue ocean strategy and address why we believe blue ocean strategy is more needed and relevant than ever before.