A New Paradigm - Blue Ocean Strategy

Blue Ocean Strategy is a thought provoking articulation of a strategy in creating value-innovation - essentially creating new markets rather than competing in existing markets - Red Oceans. This is a very interesting approach by Professors Chan Kim and Rene Maugorgne of INSEAD


Essentially the business world consists of 2 parts - the highly competitve, price/quality differentiated existing markets (called the Red Ocean as a metaphor for intense competitive landscape) and the newer, emerging, innovation defined markets ('Blue Oceans') which are often extensions of existing Red oceans but with some unique identifiers that create value.

The strategy talks about creating unique value and uses a very user-friendly tool based approach to develop the RERC (Reduce, Eliminate, Raise, Create) Grid to commnence developing the strategy. Additionally several strategies used by companies in varied fields from Culture and Entertainment (Circue du Soleil) to FMCG (Yellowtail) are described and elucidated using very easy to comprehend graphs and tables. All in all, a very interesting and perceptive look at creating differentiation in a crowded marketplace.

At HCL, the Blue Ocean strategy is one of the three key cornerstones for creating a value system - the others being the Employee First and Integrated Service Delivery. At HCL, we are constantly encouraged to think out of the box and use the available tools and frameworks in BO to draft business ideas, templates and define ideas for exponential revenue/profit generation - the key to the business strategy is 'Exponential' & not linear value/revenue/P&L creation

I was one of the speakers privileged to be invited by one of the leading Rotary Clubs in Chennai (formerly Madras) in India to address a very august group on Blue Ocean strategy in a fund raiser event. I thought the event was very well organized, had excellent speakers (despite yours' truly), was very well attended and for me, it was a great experience to share the dias with some of the best known folks in indian academia and industry.

Transformation at HCL – an interesting case study

Recently I was asked to speak at the FST (http://www.fst.net.au/agenda.aspx?confid=2) on transformation and what we did at HCL which elicited attention from some of the leading thinkers, analysts and journalists. I thought it may be a good idea to invite some thought process on what we did, why we attempted to do what we did and where we are in regards to the transformation agenda. Also we may discuss on some of the key learnings we have had as a result of this exercise, some areas where we did better than the rest. All in all I thought it was an interesting session and one of my proudest moments came when I was asked for a copy of the presentation made and asked to present by the CTO of a leading Bank in APAC to his team in Melbourne & Sydney. Not a bad day’s work I would imagine.

More soon to come...

Conversational Marketing

Conversational Marketing is a marketing communications strategy and philosophy that helps companies drive revenue through their CRM strategies. By incorporating a listening based marketing communications strategy such as Conversational Marketing, companies can have more productive communications, be more efficient with their revenue generation and better differentiate themselves from their competitors

Soon to come...