BLUE OCEAN SHIFT / Beyond Competing

Personal thoughts on some trending issues as a product of my COVID-19 positive test and isolation (so do not take it so seriously)

by Marko ?ade?

GOING OPERATIONAL! There is one (but not only one) main gain in reading this great book! A lot of stuff was written on Blue Ocean Shift, but never going so far inside practical, operational actions, steps, moves. Never so transferable from the discourse to the real business environment we are living in.

Reduced to the maximum there are two concepts if not mindsets of assessing opportunities. The first known as RED OCEAN STRATEGY (which is market-competing / one gains and the other loses markets).

And BLUE OCEAN SHIFT which is market-creating, reshaping and enquiring never explored market potentials. The fact is that we are living in a deep Red Ocean nowadays, maybe deepest since the 1930s. Closing our markets, competing in everything we can imagine - even in vaccination priorities in a time of the biggest pandemic crisis in our history.

This book is exactly NOT discussing this big geostrategic in such historic, epic terms. It is a manual for doing our businesses in a one and only sustainable way. First, it's taking us to adopt a blue ocean strategy perspective. To look beyond the self-imposed limits of our industries and offerings. To shift the focus our understanding of where opportunity resides. Then it is giving us clear practical tools to translate this new opportunity into clear buyers/consumers' advantages and preferences seen as a new value and finally learning to incorporate humanness in the process -which no more, but no less than introduce ownership to the people.

You will learn to draw your "Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas", to scratch "Buyer Utility Map", to find where are you different categories of "noncustomers" and to turn to relevant ones. The Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Grid (ERRC) will walk you through different industries and offering examples to understand the essence of the Big picture Business Modell approach even for the smallest businesses.

BUT MOST IMPORTANT MINDGAME if you really want to take the road to Blue Ocean Shift is to understand why our world is so RED-Competitive-Egoistic. Something I read years ago in one of my favorite books in English translation would be "EGO - The Game of Life" written by Frank Schirrmacher who was publisher of the most important german-speaking newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and who dies shortly after the publishing of his mentioned book.

Schirrmacher focuses himself on social, political, economical egoism based on game theories well developed shortly after second world war. What started as a simple Cold-War methodology "Learn to act rationally only if your starting point is your or your group very own interest". This Model of thinking survived Cold-War and war strategies. Digitalization and modern technology developed it to a "System of Indoctrination". Red Ocean World is in that sense not the product of some egoistic hedge fund managers but the mainstream paradigm in our interactions.

Following Schirrmacher more psycho-social history of "game theory of egoism" which shaped our behavior more than anything in the last decades, Vaclaw Smils last masterpiece "Growth" is epochally exposing physical limits of growth challenging RED OCEAN mindset in every possible way. His Idea of no possibility of decoupling growth in GDP from growth in material and energy use inspires more and more researchers to look beyond GDP (one of them is my great friend writing his Ph.D. in London on this topic). Smil is putting great Quote from Kenneth Boulding to illustrate his opinion: "Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist" (and Kenneth was an economist).

GOING PERSONAL. And that is why I walked from one very practical written, almost manual book, as Blue Ocean Shift from W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne to deeper insights in the deepness of RED OCEAN we are living in. PERSONAL because I am from Serbia / Wester Balkans, Region which is living "one has to die so another could win" philosophy so literally that we still run blind around reality.

But maybe we should start small, operational, practical with a manual from "Blue Ocean Shift" book. Europe could also start to remember why they started their Blue Ocean Shift after 2. World War. It was not physical wat made Europe grow but a vision of reshaping the idea of living together, having common interests, drawing, and understanding clear buyers (citizens) seekings.

Going more into details of our regional problems and rednesses would be content for another text. But looking form an alien perspective it sounds simple. There are three overreaching rules for Blue Ocean shift: HIGH IMPACT, LOW COST, RAPIDE EXECUTION: Integrating economies of countries in our region would radically impact the speed of closing a living standard gap, it will drastically reduce the cost of our administrations and doing business, and would rapidly build regional business players ale to survive in brutal market competition.