Michael E. Porter Quotes

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.

The planning process doesn’t produce strategy

As shown in figure 2-2, to break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost and to create a new value curve, there are four key questions to challenge an industry’s strategic logic and business model: Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard? Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard? Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

An Incoherent Strategy When a company’s value curve looks like a bowl of spaghetti — a zigzag with no rhyme or reason, where the offering can be described as “low-high-low-low-high-low-high” — it signals that the company doesn’t have a coherent strategy. Its strategy is likely based on independent substrategies. These may individually make sense and keep the business running and everyone busy, but collectively they do little to distinguish the company from the best competitor or to provide a clear strategic vision. This is often a reflection of an organization with divisional or functional silos.

stop looking to the competition. Value-innovate and let the competition worry about you.

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.

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. Value innovation places equal emphasis on value.

Simply put, there is no substitute for meeting and listening to dissatisfied customers directly.

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.

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.

Shift from convergence to divergence

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.

The key here is not to pursue pricing against the competition within an industry but rather to pursue pricing against substitutes and alternatives across industries and nonindustries.

The Pivotal Lever: Disproportionate Influence Factors The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion. Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise

Competition is only good up to a point. When supply exceeds demand