Categories: Articles

Blue Ocean Strategy – Montreal Business Book Club – Next Wednesday

The Montreal Business Book Club is meeting to discuss Blue Ocean Strategy – How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant by: W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.
We will be discussing Blue Ocean Strategy on Wednesday, June 29th here, at Twist Image, from 6:30 – 7:30 pm.
As always, please let me know if you would like to join the group. Feel free to bring some snacks and drinks.
Here’s a quick blurb about the Blue Ocean Strategy from their website:
“Companies have long engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation.
Yet in today’s overcrowded industries, competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody ‘red ocean’ of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne contend that while most companies compete within such red oceans, this strategy is increasingly unlikely to create profitable growth in the future.
Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, Kim and Mauborgne argue that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating ‘blue oceans’ of uncontested market space ripe for growth . Such strategic moves – termed ‘value innovation’ – create powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers, rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand.
Blue Ocean Strategy provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant. In this frame-changing book, Kim and Mauborgne present a proven analytical framework and the tools for successfully creating and capturing blue oceans. Examining a wide range of strategic moves across a host of industries, Blue Ocean Strategy highlights the six principles that every company can use to successfully formulate and execute blue ocean strategies. The six principles show how to reconstruct market boundaries, focus on the big picture, reach beyond existing demand, get the strategic sequence right, overcome organizational hurdles, and build execution into strategy.
Upending traditional thinking about strategy, this landmark book charts a bold new path to winning the future.”
Our Guest Moderator will be Chris Mahoney from EGM Partners (who also suggested this title as this month’s Montreal Business Book Club Selection).

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.