Creating Blue Oceans

Slingshot Living Radio – Featured Visionary: Jonathan Hornby

TUNE IN TODAY for the broadcast of Slingshot Living Radio with featured  visionary Jonathan Hornby, Director of Worldwide Marketing for Performance Management at SAS, the North Carolina-based software company named the Best Company to Work for by Forbes Magazine, and find out the answer to the question:

What is it like to be one of the movers and shakers at the best workplace in America?

What if you could re-engage your childhood creativity and sense of limitless possibilities – in order to overstep perceived limitations for continuous business and personal success?

SLINGSHOT is the first book-based journey addressing this very topic and to unfold on all media channels closest to you. With Gabor as your host, SLINGSHOT will appear through national radio and online TV shows, downloadable text, live events, printed article series, accompanying illustrations and music.

Watch, listen, play, join fascinating personalities and apply concepts yourself that are helping to shape the world through meaningful creativity and innovation.

[Image © 2010 Slingshot Living]

A healthy dose of reassurance

On September 22nd, Assurex Global partners from around the world gathered in Washington, DC, to immerse themselves in Gabor’s message of turning unconventional ideas into high-growth strategies.  Assurex Global, is an exclusive partnership of the top independent insurance and risk management brokers world wide.

A copy of the event agenda at the Ritz-Carlton, Washington, DC, is available here. Meanwhile, if you feel the combination of Blue Ocean Strategy and Defying Conventional Wisdom is a strong match for your upcoming event, you can get in touch with us at the email link in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

About Assurex Global:  Assurex Global is an exclusive partnership of the top independent insurance and risk management brokers world wide. Its 50-plus year history is built upon the belief that the best independent brokers are entrepreneurial, innovative, principled, loyal and focused on doing what's right for the client.

[Image via Espion.]

The Four Steps of Visualizing Strategy: Step Four—Visual Communication

Continuing in our series which takes a closer look at each step in creating a Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas, our focus advances to the fourth and final step—Visual Communication. Once featured, each step is made accessible through the Blue Ocean Strategy Basics archive of our site.  For the fourth step, we turn to pages 93 - 94 of the book Blue Ocean Strategy (co-authored by Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne):


After the future strategy is set, the last step is to communicate it in a way that can be easily understood by any employee. EFS [European Financial Services Co.] distributed the one-page picture showing its new and old strategic profiles so that every employee could see where the company stood and where it had to focus its efforts to create a compelling future. The senior managers who participated in developing the strategy held meetings with their direct reports to walk them through the picture, explaining what needed to be eliminated, reduced, raised, and created to pursue a blue ocean. Those people passed the message on to their direct reports. Employees were so motivated by the clear game plan that many pinned up a version of the picture in their cubicles as a reminder of EFS’s new priorities and the gaps that needed to be closed.

The new picture became a reference point for all investment decisions. Only those ideas that would help EFS move from the old to the new value curve were given the go ahead. When, for example, regional offices requested that the IT department add links on the Web site — something that in the past would have been agreed to without debate — IT asked them to explain how the new links helped move EFS toward its new profile. If the regional offices couldn’t provide an explanation, the request was denied, thereby promoting clarity and not confusion on the Web site. Similarly, when the IT department pitched a multimillion-dollar back-office system to top management, the system’s ability to meet the new value curve’s strategic needs was the chief metric by which it was judged.

Related links:

Buy the Blue Ocean Strategy book

[Image via Stelex.]

Slingshot Living Radio – Featured Visionaries

What if you could re-engage your childhood creativity and sense of limitless possibilities—in order to overstep perceived limitations for continuous business and personal success?

SLINGSHOT is the first book-based journey addressing this very topic and to unfold on all media channels closest to you. With Gabor as your host, SLINGSHOT will appear through national radio and online TV shows, downloadable text, live events, printed article series, accompanying illustrations and music.

Watch, listen, play, join fascinating personalities and apply concepts yourself that are helping to shape the world through meaningful creativity and innovation.

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK for the broadcast of Slingshot Living Radio with featured  visionary Jonathan Hornby, Director of Worldwide Marketing for Performance Management at SAS, the North Carolina-based software company named the Best Company to Work for by Forbes Magazine, and find out the answer to the question:

What is it like to be one of the movers and shakers at the best workplace in America?

Sticking together with Blue Ocean Strategy

The event theme this year for the annual conference of FEICA, the Association of European adhesives and sealants manufacturers and their national trade associations, was “Creating Blue Oceans: Turning unconventional ideas into winning strategies.” Each year, FEICA members from across Europe gather to immerse themselves in the latest business trends and strategies, and to collaborate with industry colleagues.

As a leading expert on Blue Ocean Strategy and Defying Conventional Wisdom, on the principal day of the conference Gabor delivered a rousing Keynote presentation, and afterwards led an interactive Workshop sponsored by DOW, HB Fuller and Henkel.   The next day, attendees tuned in closely during the Question and Answer discussion panel to catch Gabor’s closing remarks and observations for the European chemical adhesives industry.

A copy of the event agenda at the waterfront Scandic Marina Center is available here.  Meanwhile, if you feel the combination of Blue Ocean Strategy and Defying Conventional Wisdom is a strong match for your upcoming event, you can get in touch with us at the email link in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

About FEICA:  FEICA is a multinational association representing the European Adhesive & Sealant Industry. With the support of 15 national associations and many direct or affiliated members, FEICA coordinates, represents and advocates the common interests of the Adhesive & Sealant Industry throughout Europe. The mission of FEICA is to take the lead in resolving multinational issues affecting the industry in co-operation with its national association and direct members.

The four steps of visualizing strategy: Step Three—Visual Strategy Fair

Continuing in our series which takes a closer look at the application steps for visualizing strategy, our focus advances to the third step—Visual Strategy Fair. Once featured, each step is made accessible through the Blue Ocean Strategy Basics archive.  For the third step, we turn to page 90 of the book Blue Ocean Strategy (co-authored by Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne), illustrating the experience of EFS (a European Financial Services Co.):

After two weeks of drawing and redrawing [possible new strategies], the [internal] teams presented their strategy canvases at what we call a visual strategy fair. Attendees included senior corporate executives but consisted mainly of representatives of EFS’s external constituencies — the kinds of people the managers had met with during their field trips, including noncustomers, customers of competitors, and some of the most demanding EFS customers. In two hours, the teams presented all twelve [value] curves — six by the online group, and six by the offline group. They were given no more than ten minutes to present each curve, on the theory that any idea that takes more than ten minutes to communicate is probably too complicated to be any good. The pictures were hung on the walls so that the audience could easily see them.

For more on this example, turn to page 90 of the book Blue Ocean Strategy.

Related links:

Buy the Blue Ocean Strategy book

[Image via Flickr.]

Slingshot Living Radio – Featured visionary: Frank Nuovo

 

What if you could re-engage your childhood creativity and sense of limitless possibilities—in order to overstep perceived limitations for continuous business and personal success?

SLINGSHOT is the first book-based journey addressing this very topic and to unfold on all media channels closest to you. With Gabor as your host, SLINGSHOT will appear through national radio and online TV shows, downloadable text, live events, printed article series, accompanying illustrations and music.

Watch, listen, play, join fascinating personalities and apply concepts yourself that are helping to shape the world through meaningful creativity and innovation.

TUNE IN TODAY for the broadcast of Slingshot Living Radio with featured  visionary Frank Nuovo, Former Chief Designer at Nokia and currently Founder of Vertu Luxury Communications, and find out the answer to the question:

What was it like to be one of the pioneers of an industry that in twenty years captured over 5 billion customers worldwide?

The Perfect Calm Series: RecycleMatch – A Curated Craigslist for Industrial Waste

One of the most exciting spheres of application for Blue Ocean Strategy is the realm of Social Capitalism. This explosive market space is at the intersection of successful business and lasting social impact. Traditionally these two spheres were considered separate, but the two can be pursued simultaneously via Blue Ocean Strategy. Periodically, we feature stories which illustrate stimulating ventures, ideas and concepts targeting this very market space.

This week we select the story: RecycleMatch: A Curated Craigslist for Industrial Waste from Fast Company.

Do you know of other companies, organizations or business visionaries sailing along the intersection of good business and social good? Share your ideas with the Creating Blue Oceans Community.

[Image via Fast Company.]

The four steps of visualizing strategy: Step Two—Visual Exploration

Continuing in our series which takes a closer look at each step in creating a Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas, our focus advances to the second step—Visual Exploration. Once featured, each step is made accessible through the Blue Ocean Strategy Basics archive .  For the second step, we turn to pages 88 — 89 of the book Blue Ocean Strategy (co-authored by Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne):

The next step is to send a team into the field, putting managers face-to-face with what they must make sense of: how people use or don’t use their products or services. This step may seem obvious, but we have found that managers often outsource this part of the strategy-making process.  They rely on reports that other people (often at one or two removes from the world they report on) have put together.

A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself. Great artists don’t paint from other people’s descriptions or even from photographs; they like to see the subject for themselves. The same is true for great strategists. Michael Bloomberg, before becoming mayor of New York City, was hailed as a business visionary for his realization that the providers of financial information also needed to provide online analytics to help users make sense of the data. But he would be the first to tell you that the idea should have been obvious to anyone who had ever watched traders using Reuters or Dow Jones Telerate. Before Bloomberg, traders used paper, pencil, and handheld calculators to write down price quotes and figure fair market values before making buy and sell decisions, a practice that cost them time and money as well as built-in errors.

Related links:

Buy the Blue Ocean Strategy book.

[Image via Helder Magno.]

Ready? Set? Launch! Slingshot Living Radio launches

What if you could re-engage your childhood creativity and sense of limitless possibilities — in order to overstep perceived limitations for continuous business and personal success?

SLINGSHOT is the first book-based journey addressing this very topic and to unfold on all media channels closest to you. With Gabor as your host, SLINGSHOT will appear through national radio and online TV shows, downloadable text, live events, printed article series, accompanying illustrations and music.

Watch, listen, play, join fascinating personalities and apply concepts yourself that are helping to shape the world through meaningful creativity and innovation.

TUNE IN TODAY to the premiere broadcast of Slingshot Living Radio, with our first featured visionary: Sir Ken Robinson.

Are you ready to launch YOUR SLINGSHOT?