Huff Puff....and blow it all away into the Blue Ocean

What's the most difficult part about a weight loss regime (assuming you're not on weight loss drugs and liposuction)??

The diet? Nope. Just eat a spoonful less rice per meal....how difficult is that???

It's the first kilometer of a 4 km jog.....that's what it is..... It is the point where all the lazy muscles are just waking up. The stretch and use of the lesser known muscles that makes it feel like a rusty machine just kicking into life. Muscles that scream out "GIVE UP" when you're only on the 300 meter mark and at 500 meters it plots with your lungs to make you feel a little more breathless as you break into a very un-sexy sweat....ughhhhh

That's pretty much how it feels like when I wanna stick to my resolutions as stated in my previous entry. Oh and its nothing to do with the weight maintenance or the running....that's ok despite the dramatic introduction earlier about the perils of jogging......

So here goes....

Book review #1 (of 12)

This month's book of choice is Blue Ocean Strategy - by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

Now this is an interesting book, and by interesting I mean of late I've been hearing so much about it. Seems to be a fad in Malaysia to be excited over something very intensely and let it die off fast too once the commotion settles. Blue Ocean Strategy has been frequently quoted in many of the policy making meetings and conferences held by the Malaysian Govt (esp the Health Sector). Every other speaker in the task to appear knowledgeable use this bombastic term "Blue Ocean Strategy" like Abra-Cadabra to a Magician in hopes to woo listeners into their abysmal chain of thoughts.

The main cover has a background of a blue ocean (WOW....Original idea huh?) and big bold words "BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY" and with quick summary "How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant" and published by Harvard Business School Press (If it's good enough for Harvard, it's good enough for anyone)

Coming back to policy makers....yeah so I've attended a handful and without fail, the most exciting speaker of any day would be the one who must almost always include the phrase Blue Ocean Strategy (I'm gonna make it short into BOS from now on....hmmmm BOS......how uncanny!!), and like magic show in their next point within the same speech would be the phrase "By doing this.... we create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant"....

Again like magic...the crowd will be mesmerized and people will either start to clap like a toy monkey or most people will nod their head and whisper "BOS....BOS..."

So I gotta know....do people really know what they are talking about....or is it just a hyped up phrase that a few use and no one reads about it but everyone agrees to it (hmmm sounds almost the same principle as how gossip works....)

So after painstakingly reading it, and I do mean painstakingly.....here is the breakdown.

This book (or shall I say post dissertation publication they call a book) employs the general principles of Kaizen through the PDCA process (Plan-Do-Check-Analyse) in combination with the SWOT analysis (Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat).

That's it......really.

The rest of the book is repetitive review (won't even call in depth analysis) of many many many companies that were successful because of the PDCA + SWOT technique. (But since PDCA + SWOT has no term, they call  it BOS)

To be fair, the jist of the book can be summarised into an analysis whereby -
1. Eliminate industry standards that are taken for granted (aka useless, negligible ones)
2. Reduce non productive standards
3. Increase productive standards
4. Create new opportunities
5. Recognising the types of customers (Purchasers / Users / Influencers)

Of course, like all good theories there must be a disclaimer, which BOS states that no company that they reviewed has been successful eternally despite using the Blue Ocean Strategy method. Which brings to mind then what's the point of teaching something that has a finite usefulness and cannot adapt? Does BOS really work or is it a theoretical reasoning for the emergence of capitalists?

What's my take on it?

Perhaps CREATING uncontested market space to make the competition irrelevant is not enough. One must still learn to ADAPT and INNOVATE to stay ahead. Not just one step, but two or more steps ahead. Take Steve Jobs for example, who was able to create a never seen before Supply and feed the people to Demand it later as seen with the iPod, iBook, iMac, iPhone, and iPad. Towards the end of his life, his successors have yet to Create anything exciting, and failed badly to Innovate on the iPhone. So much so until poor Siri has been frequently called as Silly in the Chinese speaking community here who have a problem to pronounce the letter "R"

I'd give this book a 4/10 for having wonderful examples of companies that created new demands in their respective industry, but the write up could do more than calling a combination of past models as their own strategy.

Till the next book....huff puff huff puff....