What Works Brilliantly
1. The Mental Model Shift
The book’s greatest achievement is changing how you see strategy. Once you understand red versus blue ocean thinking, you can’t unsee it. You start noticing companies trapped in competitive benchmarking while others create new market space.
2. The Evidence Base
Unlike many strategy books built on anecdotes, Kim and Mauborgne studied 150 strategic moves across 120 years. That empirical grounding gives their arguments weight.
3. The Examples
From Ford’s Model T to Cirque du Soleil to Nintendo Wii, the examples span industries, geographies, and time periods. They’re not cherry-picked tech unicorns but include manufacturing, services, nonprofits, and government.
4. The Execution Focus
Dedicating half the book to execution—organizational hurdles, fair process, alignment, renewal—distinguishes this from typical strategy books that treat implementation as someone else’s problem.
5. The Visual Tools
Strategy canvas, eliminate-reduce-raise-create grid, buyer utility map—these visual frameworks make abstract strategy concrete. You can actually draw your industry’s competitive landscape.
What Frustrates and Falls Short
1. The Oversimplified Success Stories
Every blue ocean example reads like an unqualified triumph. Where are the messy middle parts? The setbacks? The near-failures? Cirque du Soleil faced bankruptcy multiple times before succeeding. [yellow tail] nearly destroyed itself through overexpansion. These struggles offer valuable lessons the book omits.
2. The Survivor Bias Problem
We only read about blue oceans that succeeded. How many attempted blue ocean strategies crashed and burned? What distinguished successful attempts from failures beyond “they didn’t follow the principles correctly”? The book needs a serious discussion of base rates.
3. The Implementation Gap
While the execution chapters help, actually applying these frameworks in a real organization is vastly harder than the book suggests. How do you build consensus on the strategy canvas when different departments see different competing factors? How do you convince a board to pursue blue ocean strategy when red ocean competitive moves feel safer? The book lacks practical guidance for navigating organizational politics during strategy formulation itself.
4. The Measurement Challenge
How do you measure progress toward a blue ocean before it exists? The book offers no leading indicators or milestones. This makes it hard to know whether you’re on the right track or heading toward an expensive failure.
5. The Timing Question
When is your market ripe for blue ocean creation versus when should you compete in the red ocean? The book implies blue ocean is always better, but sometimes the smart move is capturing share in existing markets. Guidance on this strategic choice is absent.
6. The Resource Requirements Understated
The book emphasizes low-cost blue oceans, but many examples—Salesforce.com, Apple iTunes, Dyson—required substantial resources to pull off. Small companies reading this might underestimate what’s actually required.