I’m a completely self-taught business person, I wasn’t taught how to do business in school, well, they don’t really, or they didn’t when I was at school in the 1970′s.
I’d already have several failed businesses by the time I left school because I was just a complete raging entrepreneur. Nobody ever taught me the principles of business success, so I’ve had to come up with my own over the years, but at the end of the day, I think they all boil down to the 3 Master Secrets of Business Success that I cover in my series of six videos.
What I did do right when I was starting out, from a very young age actually, was starting to read books in order to try and learn – I was consciously incompetent if you like – because I’m a very visual person and I like to take information in like that. My favourite kinds of books are ones with pictures in, pictures particularly, that illustrate what the book is talking about. Here’s a book with some great pictures that help the reader enormously to understand the concepts covered.
My recommendation for this week is an international bestseller, it’s called Blue Ocean Strategy. Now I must have bought this book two or three years ago when perhaps I started coaching with one of my mentors and I didn’t read it apparently.
I’ve never done that, I NEVER don’t read books. So it obviously was so far over my head I couldn’t even begin to take the information in. But just recently my mentor mentioned it again in one of his private client calls and I picked it up off my shelf again. Since I’ve developed so much in the last few years as a business owner myself, the content of it was a lot more relevant for me. In fact this book has ended up in my Top 20 Business Books of all time and you can find the others by clicking that link there.
Let me just tell you a little bit about the book, from the back cover. It says:
“Don’t compete with your rivals, make them irrelevant. Companies have long engaged in head-to-head competitions in search of sustained profitable growth. They fought for their competitive advantage, they battled over market share and they struggled for differentiation. Yet in today’s overcrowded industries, competing head on results are nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements of the strategic success, W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne contend that while most companies compete within such red oceans the strategy is increasingly unlikely to create profitable growth in the future.”
“Based on the study of over 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and 30 different industries, Kim and Mauborgne argued that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors but by creating great, big, blue oceans of uncontested market space ripe for growth. Such strategic moves turn valued innovation creates powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand.
Blue Ocean Strategy provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant. In this game changing book, they present a proven analytical framework and the tools for successful creating and capturing your own blue oceans.”
It’s a really, really interesting book because it talks about how to identify the value components of your offer. Now most people I know, the aspiring entrepreneurs and even existing businesses can’t really articulate their irresistible offer very well, much less identify the value components of it.
I’ve never been one really to look at competition, I’ve always just steamed in ahead with what I thought was a great idea. So the thought that you could actually look at your competition and analyse it in quite an easy to understand way, which is what Blue Ocean Strategy tools give you, that you can identify your own value propositions within your offer and then you can go and look at your competitors value propositions, was quite a revelation for me.
The interesting about creating a blue ocean when you’re swimming alone, with no direct competition, is that you can generally lose parts of your competitors value propositions and add parts of your own while looking at your business’ offer as if you were your customer.
The tools in this book enable you to analyse everyone’s value proposition, even if you haven’t got a very analytical brain, like me! These tools enable you to analyse your offer versus your competitors offer and come up with something really very irresistible indeed.
So I would definitely say out of all the books I’ve read this is the best one BY FAR for helping you look at your business and your competitors business and come up with something truly wonderful that really will see you going into a blue ocean and not having to compete with all the others.
Because we all know that if you’re competing with lots of other people with similar offers you end up competing on price, and that really isn’t the way to go nowadays because if you’re competing on price you’re going to get cheaper and cheaper and your delivery of your offer is going to get worse and worse. You’ll just end up overworked and resentful and not making enough money.
So come at it from the point of view of “Let’s create something really exciting and new and a great offer for our customers” even if you’re in an industry that traditional and fiercely competitive. There are LOADS of great examples in the book of “old school” company’s who have done just that, to inspire you.
If you have joined me on one of my Wednesday night webinars, I challenge you to have a go at Blue Ocean Strategy and then come back to one of these calls on a Wednesday night and let’s talk about what you’ve discovered about your own offer and what you’ve discovered about your competitors, I’d be absolutely fascinated to hear your stories.
Or do feel free to share your thoughts using the comments or Facebook box below.
