Business Change Management

Need to change? Maybe you need a Blue Ocean Strategy.

In my previous blog in this series, "How To Find Your Blue Ocean Strategy®: Step 1," I explained how Blue Ocean Strategy teaches business leaders to go where the profits and growth are and the competition isn’t—to literally make the competition irrelevant. Using this revolutionary way of approaching business growth, companies can successfully adapt to changing times by reconstructing the market space, creating demand (not just responding to it), and devising value innovation (not just adding value in an existing industry solution). 

Now you're ready for the next step: how to go visual exploring.

What is visual exploring and how will it benefit me?

Visual exploration is at the core of Blue Ocean thinking (and right up my alley as a corporate anthropologist). What we “see and feel” helps us better “think” about the problems to be solved and the ways to understand what we are really doing. Words are fine but if you see something or hear somebody talking about a problem they're having, your brain is then freed up to say, “Aha, this might be an opportunity for us!”

There are many ways to go exploring. But let me begin with a strong caveat: One of the key rules of Blue Ocean Strategic thinking is “never outsource your eyes.” What I mean by that is, don't let someone else do your discovery work for you. Get out of your office and go searching for new ideas yourself.

So, how do you do it? Here are 5 guidelines to help you structure your efforts:

For the last several months, I have been blogging about the state of higher education—specifically, the need for and responsibility of colleges to prepare students for good-paying jobs with careers once they graduate. As I have written these blogs, I have gotten angrier and angrier! Because I am convinced more than ever that the majority of colleges disregard this activity as their responsibility. Yes, their institutions (and even perhaps the administrations) pay lip service to what students are going to do next. But functionally preparing their students for that “next” is not part of their agenda.

To further illustrate my point, several weeks ago I was skimming Facebook and came upon an interesting article. It discussed preparing students for technical skills…not a “classical education,” as we used to call it, but a commercial education for non-college bound students. I must admit, it sounded pretty good and harkened back to the days when New York State awarded both college-bound (Regents) and General diplomas.

Sadly, more and more these days it seems that there's an epidemic of business leaders refusing to take responsibility for their or their company's actions, passing the buck to whomever they can: employees, the press, a computer glitch, the global economic turnaround...the list goes on.

What has happened to corporate integrity? To the notion of "the buck stops here"?

As a corporate anthropologist, I believe the problem clearly lies in a dysfunctional culture. Every company has its own individual culture, a set of habits, rules and morés—sometimes openly communicated, sometimes unspoken—that govern how employees interact and get along. When this culture is faulty, as we are seeing so often these days, employees can easily lost their way.

Our guest blogger, Cheryl McMillan, CEO Coach with Vistage International, has written an excellent and very timely blog on the subject, which I share here. Enjoy.