Quotes from W. Chan Kim

Commitment, trust, and voluntary cooperation are not merely attitudes or behaviors. They are intangible capital. They allow companies to stand apart in the speed, quality, and consistency of their execution and to implement strategic shifts fast at low cost.

To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand.

Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.

Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is. And a closer look reveals that most plans don't contain a strategy at all but rather a smorgasbord of tactics that individually make sense but collectively don't add up to a unified, clear direction that sets a company apart—let alone makes the competition irrelevant. Does this sound like the strategic plans in your company?

senior managers' goal here should be to manage their portfolio of businesses to wisely balance between profitable growth and cash flow at a given point in time.

Experiences that don't involve touching, seeing, or feeling actual results, such as being presented with an abstract sheet of numbers, are shown to be non-impactful and easily forgotten.

To reach your organization's tipping point and execute blue ocean strategy, you must alert employees to the need for a strategic shift and identify how it can be achieved with limited resources. For a new strategy to become a movement, people must not only recognize what needs to be done, but they must also act on that insight in a sustained and meaningful way. How

The planning process doesn't produce strategy

A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself. Great artists don't paint from other people's descriptions or even from photographs; they like to see the subject for themselves. The same is true for great strategists.

innovative ideas will be profitable only if they are linked to what buyers are willing to pay for.

Blue ocean strategy is not about being first to market. Rather it's about being first to get it right by linking innovation to value.

strategic planning should be more about collective wisdom building than top-down or bottom-up planning.

Partnering, however, provides a way for companies to secure needed capabilities fast and effectively while dropping their cost structure. It allows a company to leverage other companies' expertise and economies of scale. Partnering includes closing gaps in capabilities through making small acquisitions when doing so is faster and cheaper, providing access to needed expertise that has already been mastered.

We call this atomization after Einstein's reflection that if you deconstruct any challenge into its basic components, or atoms, and focus on solving them one at a time, even the largest challenge shifts from being overwhelming to being intellectually and psychologically solvable.

Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy

If you can move people by inspiring and building their confidence to own and drive your new strategy, they will be committed to seeing change through and overcoming the organizational constraints you confront.

Don't rely on market surveys.

Salespeople on commission, for example, are seldom sensitive to the costs of the sales they produce.

As companies compete to embrace customer preferences through finer segmentation, they often risk creating too-small target markets.