Creating Blue Oceans

The time for wireless to re-imagine is now

In the first century AD, the city of Pompeii in Italy was covered in ash from the massive eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius. The resulting solidified volcanic debris left behind hollow molds from which casts of victims caught in various poses by the eruption were recreated. They provide fascinating and vivid details of a day gone horribly wrong, as the eruption caught the city’s residents completely by surprise. 

The body casts of Pompeii are poignant reminders of just how unexpectedly your environment can change and how quickly you can be blindsided by seemingly inescapable dangers (excerpt from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life). 

A recent news story describing the threat to wireless carriers against their highly lucrative text messaging offerings reminds us of the tragic outcome in Pompeii, and made us wonder which carrier will be the first to begin re-imagining the wireless landscape and escape the impending doom?

From New York Times:

At a time when e-mail and many other forms of electronic communication are essentially free, wireless carriers are still charging as much as 20 cents to send a text message to a phone, and another 20 cents to receive it.

Paying so much to transmit a handful of words is starting to look as antiquated as buying stamps.

There are now a growing number of ways to bypass text-message charges using an Internet connection — much as Skype allows people to make calls without relying on a traditional telephone line. If these services catch on in a big way, analysts say, they could take a big bite out of the profits that text messages generate for wireless carriers.

[Image via Google Images.] 

Slingshot Stories: inspiring customer infatuation

For Fortune 500 heavyweights as well as small and medium enterprises, Gabor’s book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life offers the framework and inspiration to drive continuous innovation and lifestyle enrichment. Here is a short excerpt from one of the latest Slingshot application success stories:

Slingshot by Gabor George Burt has been an amazing inspiration for us and our various businesses. One business in particular is a student housing complex   whose management I oversee called Meadows Crossing. It provides housing for over 2,000 of the 25,000 students who attend Grand Valley State University, in Allendale, Michigan.          

We were particularly challenged because of the surplus of student housing space in the region, which requires housing providers to find new ways to attract students. However, Meadows Crossing is already over 200% ahead of last year's leasing pace. We attribute this incredible success rate to the principles that we have gleaned from the Slingshot Framework.   

Glenn A Turek, CCIM

Sperry Van Ness/Silveri Company 

 

What’s your Slingshot success story? Share it with us via Twitter (@SlingshotLiving).

Blue Ocean Strategy co-authors voted world’s most influential thinkers

In conjunction with McGraw Hill, the Crainer-Dearlove annual list of the World’s Top 50 Thinkers has been published. As a testament to the continued power and relevance of Blue Ocean Strategy, Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne again appear in the Top 10, this time making the leap to second place. 

Via Forbes:

The top runners-up, sharing the No. 2 spot: W. Chan Kim and Renée Maborgne, two professors at INSEAD business school whose book Blue Ocean Strategy lays out a system for developing and executing large-scale plans that has been adopted by businesses, nonprofits, and governments worldwide.

Since its initial publication in 2005, Blue Ocean Strategy remains a global, perennial bestseller, having been published in a record-breaking 42 languages.

Get truthful, unleash your creativity: Danielle LaPorte chats with Gabor

Interested in liberating truth, raw reality and grace? Then you won’t want to miss Gabor’s chat with Danielle LaPorte, agente-de-change, beacon of creative inspiration, coming up tomorrow. Danielle is the creator of WhiteHotTruth.com, which has been called "the best place on-line for kick-ass spirituality." She is the author of The Spark Kit: A Digital Experience for Entrepreneurs, an inspirational speaker, and a former think tank executive. Her next book, The Fire Starter Sessions: A Guide to Blazing Your Own Trail in Life & Work, launches in April 2012 from Random House.

You can listen in here. 

Your fork in the road: obsolescence or continuous relevance

Companies that focus too narrowly on beating their competition are in danger of losing out on substantial new market opportunities and of becoming inconsequential to consumers. The Accordion Chart™ process, as detailed in Gabor’s new book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Busines, Re-Imagine Your Life, can help you to broaden the relevance of your offering to a significantly wider audience and also draw your attention to where such opportunities reside. 

Samsung’s approach, to shift away from “infotainment” and into “lifecare,” represents the kinds of critical strategic insights gained by applying the Accordion Chart process to your offering. 

Via the Economist: 

Samsung wants to diversify away from consumer electronics, a market that suffers from falling prices, thin margins, fast product cycles and fickle customers. Chinese rivals may do to Samsung what Samsung did to Western and Japanese firms in the past. “The majority of our products today will be gone in ten years,” Samsung’s patriarch and chairman, Lee Kun-hee, told executives in deliberately alarmist tones last January. 

To survive, he said, the company must not only go into the new businesses it has identified, but open itself up to work with partners and even make acquisitions. Samsung has long been a closed world from that point of view, a disposition reinforced after the disastrous acquisition of a PC maker in the 1990s. But now the company knows it needs new skills, sales channels and customers.

Find out more about the Accordion Chart and its connection to Blue Ocean Strategy in Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.  

[Image © 2011 Slingshot by Gabor George Burt]

Infatuating with a “Dip and Squeeze”

While there is no such thing as a perfectly and continuously satisfied consumer, there is such a thing as an infatuated consumer. And there are certain offerings that may hold an almost permanent infatuation for consumers. Many of these derive from a strong childhood association that may stay with consumers for life. For example, always eating Heinz ketchup with your favorite meals as a child could spark a lifelong attachment to it, which would explain why someone as an adult would be reluctant to travel to any country where it is not available. That is a pretty strong and potentially permanent infatuation (from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life  by  Gabor George Burt).

Via the Wall Street Journal:  

Heinz for decades has searched for better single-serve packets. The company has tried making them bigger, easier to open, or attachable to a cup of French fries. None of the changes could be made cheaply or solve customers' main complaints—the single-serve packets are messy, hard to open and don't provide enough ketchup—say executives. For about the past decade, Heinz sold two single-serve containers: the classic squeeze packet and a dipping cup.

Heinz believes traditional ketchup packets are so annoying that they stop people from ordering fries at drive-thrus. "Fry inclusion orders" at drive-thrus "have been going down for years," says John Bennett, vice president of food-service ketchup, condiments and sauces for Heinz.

How does your offering continually infatuate? Share your story with us via Twitter (@SlingshotLiving). 

[Image via PMMI.]

Blue Ocean Strategy: still one of the most highly sought after business books

Since its initial publication in 2005, Blue Ocean Strategy remains a global, perennial bestseller, having been published in a record-breaking 42 languages. Most recently, Blue Ocean Strategy appears on 800-CEO-READ’s September 2011 list of best-selling business books by corporate customers. 800-CEO-READ is a leading direct supplier of book-based resources. 

Via the Miami Herald: 

24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne; Harvard Business Press, 256 pages ($29.95).

If you’re a fan of Blue Ocean Strategy, you’ll definitely want to grab a copy of Gabor’s new book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life, which links systematic creativity with smart strategy. 

Are you attracting or repelling your best customers?

In order to stay relevant in a fast and continuously changing environment, you need to be market driving rather than market driven. Market driven, no matter how responsive, is a reactionary stance. In contrast, market driving is proactive, creating spaces of lifestyle enrichment that did not exist before (from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life by Gabor George Burt).

Case in point: the cautionary tale of one airline which is bypassing the golden opportunity to further enrich the lives of its best passengers and is instead pursuing a kneejerk strategy of cost-cutting that will alienate its most loyal customers. 

Via Businessweek:

To avoid raising prices, a number of consumer-products makers have chosen to reduce quantity: A half-gallon carton of ice cream a few years ago became a quart-and-a-half carton, facial tissues were reduced in size so they now “rattle” around in oversized boxes, a 13.5-oz. box of crackers turned into a 12.25-oz. box of crackers, and so on. Do they think customers are stupid and won’t notice?

The airlines are among the worst offenders, almost seeming to work hard to make interstate bus travel look elegant….

Have you spotted a missed opportunity for a brand to enrich the lives of its customers? Tell us about it via Twitter (@SlingshotLiving).

[Image via travelshopgirl.]

Scott Belsky joins Gabor on Slingshot Living Radio

Tomorrow morning grab yourself a tasty cup of coffee and tune in to Slingshot Living for a real big treat as Gabor chats with Scott Belsky. Scott is the author of the national best-selling book Making Ideas Happen and CEO of Behance and recently noted in a Fast Company video that “to create what will be, you must remove yourself from the constant concern for what already is.” 

In the meantime, why not start re-imagining your business—or even your life—with Gabor’s new, inspiring book Slingshot?

Blue Ocean Strategy: banking on the “unbanked”

Challenging an industry’s conventional wisdom about which buyer group to target can lead to the discovery of new blue oceans. By looking across buyer groups, companies can gain new insights into how to redesign their value curves to focus on a previously overlooked set of buyers (Blue Ocean Strategy, page 61).

And it looks like a few telecom carriers in Africa are doing just that by launching products that allow money to be transferred between mobile users across all mobile telephone networks—“a mobile phone-based alternative to MoneyGram or Western Union.” 

Via Zimbabwe Independent: 

A Blue Ocean is an entirely new industry, created by bringing in neglected potential customer segments through offering them compelling buyer utility not currently offered anywhere. In a recent research, four buyer utility values were mentioned by the users of M-Pesa. Ninety-eight per cent (98%) cited speed, 98% picked safety, 96% identified convenience and 96% cited affordability (M-Pesa costs between 0,2% and 0,9% of amount to be transferred). In a Blue Ocean competition is irrelevant. With no competition, profits are sterling.

M-Pesa is branching into other creative product offerings. 

What do you think about the Blue Ocean-like approach of these carriers? Share your thoughts with us via Twitter (@SlingshotLiving). 

[Image via MI-Geekculture.]