The co-author of the hottest-selling business how-to book in the world will be the featured guest of a breakfast to kick off the second annual Wisconsin Business & Technology Expo on Wednesday, May 3. Renee Mauborgne, co-author of "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant," will share her insights at the Expo, which will take place May 3-4 at the Wisconsin Exposition Center at State Fair Park in West Allis.
The Expo is presented by Small Business Times, with The Schroeder Group S.C. serving as premier sponsor. More than 3,000 people attended the inaugural Expo last year. Blue Ocean Strategy is the top-selling book on the 2005 list of business books ranked by 800-CEO-READ, a Milwaukee-based business book distributor. Mauborgne’s book also was listed as one of the Top 10 Business Books of 2005 by Amazon.com and was selected as the No. 1 Strategy Book of 2005 by Strategy + Business, Booz Allen & Hamilton’s leading business magazine. In addition, the book is listed as one of Fast Company magazine’s Best Books of 2005 and has received several other awards of distinction.
Mauborgne is a fellow of the World Economic Forum and a professor of strategy and management at INSEAD, France, the world’s second-largest business school. Mauborgne and her co-author, W. Chan Kim, co-founded the Value Innovation Network (VIN), a global community of practice on the Value Innovation family of concepts. At the Wisconsin Business & Technology Expo, Mauborgne will explain to business owners and other top executives how to rise above and beyond their competition to points of unique distinction.
"I think most companies know that strategic planning is an imperfect process. There are certainly many books and articles criticizing it. But they have not had an alternative to it, so companies have kept on using it because it does allow for some degree of accountability," Mauborgne said. "We offer a compelling alternative. We begin by giving companies three pointers on how to break out of the red and into the blue ocean. Number one: stop benchmarking the competition. The more you benchmark your competitors, the more you tend to look like them. That makes you a me-too organization, which is the opposite of what you want to achieve," she said. "Second: stop being content to swim in the red ocean. Many companies are caught up in competing and don’t even look to the horizon of the blue ocean. And third: don’t count on your customers for growth. Look to non-customers; they provide the most insights into how you can create new, uncontested opportunities—new demand for your products or services."
Blue Ocean Strategies has broken the Harvard Business School Press record for the highest number of foreign licenses ever obtained, as the book is being published in 30 languages. Mauborgne’s book also was selected by 800-CEO-READ president Jack Covert as one of his "Jack Covert Selects" titles of recommended reading. "There are plenty of books that deal with developing strategy for competing in your existing markets, but what caught my attention with this book was Blue Ocean Strategy’s focus on developing strategy in new, nonexistent markets," Covert said. "Kim and Maubornge are big fans of the strategy canvas tool (a graphical tool for comparing customer-defined attributes among companies). You’ll find out how to leverage the six types of buyer utility and understand the price corridor of the mass. They also spend time telling you how to talk to your employees, your shareholders and your customers about blue ocean changes. I don’t recommend very many hard-core strategy titles, so that should give you some idea of what I think about the book."
Business Books
The 800-CEO-READ Top 5 Best Books of 2005 are:
- "Blue Ocean Strategy," Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne
- "The 7 Irrefutable Rules of Small Business," Steven S. Little
- "It’s Your Ship," Michael Abrashoff
- "Overpromise and Overdeliver," Rick Barrera
- "Radical Leap," Steve Farber
The complete list is available online http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/005895.html.
