Top 15 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. Value innovation places equal emphasis on value.

Blue oceans are right next to you in every industry.

Focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors

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

While good strategy content is based on a compelling value proposition for buyers with a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating-people proposition.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Value innovation requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a leap in value for both buyers and themselves.

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 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.