When I came across the Blue Ocean strategy concept in a late 2005 article in Harvard Business Review, I didn’t think it was that big a deal. As BO goes, you need to find yourself a market space where you own the category – where you call the shots without any intrusion of competitors. If you are occupying a space with competitors, you’re in the "red ocean", in simplistic terms. BO seems like common sense to me, but it’s not something easy to achieve. The examples cited in the article and book were, I feel, were very retrospective and hindsight based. It seems to me that the authors were just trying to fit in their BO model on to those case studies they’ve selected. It’s seems descriptive and I questioned its prescriptive / applicability value for a company operating in the now and be tested against the future.
Interestingly, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, “Black Swan”, which just hit the local stand talks about how we will never be able to prescribe or predict the future. Our limitations in knowledge and frames of logic wouldn’t allow us to do so. We can’t predict outliers because we simply can’t fathom them, for example 9/11, the impact of the internet, etc. The title of the book itself underlies this theory where in the western world all swans are deemed to be white – until they came across a black one (from Australia) which totally blew their minds and understanding of the world.So between BO and BS, read BO if you want to learn the buzzword and impress your peers, otherwise do check out BS, so that you learn to understand what you don’t understand (I highly recommend it).
