Executive Street, the daily blog of Vistage International, recently published an article by Andrea Simon entitled, “How Do I Do a “Blue Ocean Strategy®”?: Step 2” A follow-up article to her previous Executive Street-featured blog, “How Do I Do a ‘Blue Ocean Strategy®?’: Step 1,″ this one focuses on Andrea’s work with a company’s leadership team that is devoted to using the tools of Blue Ocean Strategic thinking to help them reinvent their business.
How could a Blue Ocean Strategic process help these guys?
To find out, Andrea took them exploring. Visual exploration is at the core of Blue Ocean thinking. For good reason. We know that what we “see and feel” helps us better “think” about the problems to be solved and the ways to understand what we are really doing. Words are fine but if you see something or hear somebody talking about a problem they cannot figure out, something in your brain goes, “Aha, there is the opportunity for us.”
In Executive Street article, Andrea Simon offers Six Paths to organize your own exploration:
1. Think about what you are trying to find: New ways to do your business that will let you create a new market space is one area to consider. Think about what Netflix did to Blockbuster and what Red Box is doing to Netflix. How could your company rethink how it does things?
2. Another area to explore: Where are new market segments emerging that you are not focused on because they are beyond your normal scope? [yellow tail] wine went after beer drinkers, not wine drinkers, and opened up an entirely new market segment.
3. Perhaps there are ways you can change your target audience to focus on the buyer groups you are not paying attention to today—like pharma did when it went after the user of their medications, not the prescribing doctor.
4. Maybe you are very good at running something today—a factory or a doctor’s office—but you could change your scope and run dozens of factories or doctors’ offices in the future.
5. Functional and emotional opportunities are particularly interesting. If what you do is very serious, maybe you can do what André Rieu did to classical music and make it fun.
6. And finally, can you leap frog over what is being done today and do it better. Apple seems to do that routinely, taking already existing solutions from MP3 players or Blackberry phones and creating completely different packing solutions that transform the market.
To read Andrea’s blog in its entirety on Executive Street, click here.
About Dr. Andrea Simon and Simon Associates Management Consultants
New York-based Simon Associates Management Consultants (SAMC) serves clients in a wide range of industries from manufacturing, OEMs, customer care, hospitals, and other healthcare institutions to colleges and service industry companies, among others.
One of the keys to SAMC’s success is helping the leadership at companies to “see, feel, and think” in new ways. For more information, visit www.simonassociates.net. You also can follow SAMC on Twitter (@andisamc) or Facebook.
