Blue Ocean Classics

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne changed the field of strategy and the language of business forever with their path-breaking "blue ocean strategy," a new model for creating uncontested markets that unlock all new demand and growth. This book brings together three of their classic Harvard Business Review articles that upend traditional thinking for creating and capturing lasting value. 

In Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne introduce the idea of blue oceans, previously unknown market spaces where demand is created rather than fought over, and the opportunities for profitable growth are wide and untainted. The article highlights the distinctive differences between market-competing and market-creating strategy and what it takes to create the new markets of tomorrow.

Red Ocean Traps shows that managers' mental models — ingrained assumptions about the way the world works — undermine attempts to make market-creating strategic moves that unlock blue oceans. Kim and Mauborgne provide a framework that reveals the assumptions managers make in creating new markets that keep their efforts tethered to existing overcrowded industries (red oceans). 

In Blue Ocean Leadership, the authors address what is perhaps the greatest challenge of leadership: closing the gulf between the potential and the realized talent and energy of employees. They outline an approach to uncovering which leadership acts and activities will inspire employees, and a process for getting managers to start doing them.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne are Professors of Strategy at INSEAD and Codirectors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. They are the authors of the New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, BLUE OCEAN SHIFT and the international bestseller BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, which is recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written. Blue Ocean Strategy has sold over 4 million copies, is being published in a record-breaking 49 languages, and is a bestseller across five continents. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne rank in the top 5 management gurus in the world in the Thinkers50 list, a title they have held for ten straight years, and are the recipients of numerous academic and management awards around the world including the Nobels Colloquia Prize for Leadership on Business and Economic Thinking, the Carl S. Sloane Award by the Association of Management Consulting Firms, the Leadership Hall of Fame by Fast Company, and the Eldridge Haynes Prize by the Academy of International Business, among others. They are Fellows of the World Economic Forum and the founders of the Blue Ocean Global Network. For more on these authors and their new book, BLUE OCEAN SHIFT, see blueoceanstrategy.com.