Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.
Why Perpetual recommends it
Blue Ocean Strategy, by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, argues that the biggest strategic wins don’t come from beating competitors in an existing market, a red ocean stained by rivalry, but from creating genuinely new market space where competition is temporarily irrelevant, a blue ocean. The book has sold millions of copies precisely because it gives leaders a structured way to search for that space rather than treating it as a matter of pure inspiration.
The authors’ central tool, the strategy canvas, plots how an industry currently competes across shared factors, and then asks leaders to eliminate, reduce, raise or create factors deliberately rather than incrementally improving on what competitors already do. Their classic example, Cirque du Soleil, succeeded not by being a better circus, but by combining elements of theatre and circus that no one had previously combined.
Kim and Mauborgne are careful to show that blue oceans don’t stay blue forever, competitors eventually follow, which means the real capability worth building isn’t a single blue ocean move, it’s the organisational habit of searching for new value creation repeatedly rather than settling into a single winning formula.
We often use the four actions framework, eliminate, reduce, raise, create, directly with clients working through competitive strategy, because it forces genuinely creative thinking rather than defaulting to matching competitors feature for feature.
- Blue oceans are created through new value, not by winning within existing competition
- The strategy canvas maps how an industry competes so leaders can deliberately diverge from it
- Eliminate, reduce, raise and create are four concrete levers for building new market space
- Blue oceans eventually attract competitors, so the real skill is repeatable value innovation
A practical exercise is mapping your industry’s strategy canvas honestly, then asking which factor you could eliminate entirely that competitors assume is essential.
We give this book four out of five stars.
