Blue Ocean Strategy: What If You’re Competing in the Wrong Ocean?
I’ve been returning to a familiar strategy framework in several recent coaching conversations.
Blue Ocean Strategy.
It’s been around for more than 20 years, but its relevance continues to grow, particularly as leaders navigate changing markets, emerging technologies, organizational complexity, and increasing pressure to deliver results.
The central idea is simple.
What if success isn’t about beating the competition? What if it’s about creating something that changes the competition altogether?
That’s the thinking behind Blue Ocean Strategy.
And with the release of an updated edition featuring Taylor Swift and NVIDIA, there’s a compelling reason to revisit what this framework teaches us about strategy, leadership, and growth.
Understanding red oceans and blue oceans
Developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy challenges conventional thinking about competition.
The authors describe two different environments.
Red oceans represent existing markets.
The boundaries are established. Competitors are known. Organizations compete for the same customers, talent, resources, and opportunities.
Success often means outperforming someone else.
More features. Lower prices. Greater efficiency. Faster execution.
Over time, competition intensifies and opportunities for differentiation narrow.
Blue oceans represent new market space.
Instead of fighting over existing demand, organizations create new demand.
They challenge assumptions about what customers value, reconsider traditional industry boundaries, and introduce approaches that change the rules.
The distinction matters.
Red ocean thinking asks:
“How can we outperform our competitors?”
Blue ocean thinking asks:
“What could we create that makes the current competition less relevant?”
Both approaches have a place in business.
But leaders who only focus on outperforming others may overlook opportunities to create something different.
The foundation: Value innovation
At the heart of Blue Ocean Strategy is a concept called value innovation.
The goal isn’t simply to innovate.
It’s to create a meaningful increase in value while reconsidering the costs, complexity, and assumptions that define the current market.
Traditionally, organizations believe they must choose between differentiation and lower cost.
Blue Ocean Strategy challenges that tradeoff.
It asks leaders to rethink what should be eliminated, reduced, raised, or created.
This brings us to one of the framework’s most practical tools.
The Four Actions Framework
Four questions help leaders reconsider where and how they create value.
1. Eliminate
What assumptions, activities, or industry practices no longer create meaningful value?
Organizations often continue doing things simply because they’ve always been done.
What could you stop?
2. Reduce
What are we overinvesting in?
Where are we adding complexity without improving outcomes?
More isn’t always better.
3. Raise
What matters most to customers, employees, or stakeholders that deserves greater attention?
Where could we deliver substantially more value?
4. Create
What doesn’t exist today that people would find valuable?
What unmet needs or overlooked opportunities could we address?
Together, these questions move leaders beyond incremental improvement.
They create space to rethink the work itself.
Taylor Swift: Creating value beyond the music
Taylor Swift is an interesting example because her success cannot be explained by musical talent alone.
The newer Blue Ocean Strategy case examines how she made a series of strategic decisions that changed her relationship with audiences and the broader entertainment industry.
Rather than competing solely through album sales, radio exposure, or streaming performance, Swift expanded what it means to be a music artist.
She built a direct relationship with fans.
She created experiences that extended beyond individual songs and albums.
She developed a community whose members became active participants in her success.
Her decision to rerecord earlier albums also changed the conversation around artistic ownership and control.
And the Eras Tour demonstrated how a concert could become a larger cultural experience.
The strategic lesson isn’t that every organization needs a passionate fan community.
It’s that Swift expanded the definition of the value she was creating.
She wasn’t competing only for listeners.
She was creating deeper participation, connection, and ownership.
For leaders, this raises an important question:
Are we competing on the same measures as everyone else, or are we creating value others haven’t considered?
NVIDIA: Seeing a market before everyone else
NVIDIA provides a different example.
The company’s story illustrates how organizations can create new markets by recognizing possibilities beyond their original customers.
NVIDIA initially focused on graphics processing technology for gaming.
But its leaders recognized that the same processing capabilities could solve problems far beyond gaming.
The company expanded into accelerated computing, scientific applications, and eventually artificial intelligence. Rather than simply building better gaming technology, NVIDIA helped establish entirely new applications for its capabilities.
The newer Blue Ocean Strategy case studies examine three important moves:
1999: Introducing the graphics processing unit.
2006: Expanding GPU capabilities into general-purpose computing.
2016: Making advanced AI computing more accessible through integrated systems.
These decisions helped position NVIDIA for the extraordinary growth in AI computing.
But there’s another important lesson.
Creating a blue ocean doesn’t mean remaining there forever.
As AI demand expands, NVIDIA faces increasing competition, including from companies that are also among its largest customers.
The strategic challenge becomes one of continued reinvention.
How do you keep creating value when others begin entering the market you helped establish?
For leaders, the lesson is clear.
A successful strategy isn’t something you develop once and protect indefinitely.
It requires continued awareness of changing needs, emerging opportunities, and the assumptions that may no longer hold.
What does this mean for leadership?
Blue Ocean Strategy is usually discussed in the context of business growth and competitive positioning.
But I find it equally useful when working with individual leaders.
Consider the executive who wants to advance but continues competing for recognition using the same approach as everyone else.
Or the leader whose team is overwhelmed by competing priorities, yet continues adding processes, meetings, and expectations.
Or the organization that wants innovation but measures success primarily through maintaining existing practices.
In each situation, the challenge may not be a lack of effort.
It may be the assumptions guiding that effort.
Sometimes the most valuable leadership question isn’t:
“How do we do more?”
It’s:
“What should we be doing differently?”
Applying blue ocean thinking to your leadership
Consider these four questions through the lens of your own leadership.
Eliminate: What am I continuing to do because it’s expected, even though it no longer creates value?
Reduce: Where am I investing too much time or energy without a meaningful return?
Raise: What leadership behaviors would create greater trust, clarity, or impact if I gave them more attention?
Create: What could I introduce that would improve how my team works, makes decisions, or serves others?
This isn’t about abandoning accountability or avoiding competition.
It’s about becoming more intentional about where you invest your effort.
And recognizing that better results don’t always come from doing more of the same.
A final thought
The most interesting part of Blue Ocean Strategy isn’t the promise of finding a market without competition.
It’s the discipline of questioning assumptions.
Taylor Swift challenged how an artist could build relationships and create value.
NVIDIA challenged what graphics-processing technology could make possible.
Both demonstrate the importance of looking beyond the boundaries of an existing market.
As leaders, we can become so focused on delivering results within the current system that we stop questioning whether the system itself needs to change.
Sometimes growth requires better execution.
Sometimes it requires a different strategy.
Knowing the difference is part of effective leadership.
To go deeper
Start with the original framework
Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The updated 20th-anniversary edition includes the Taylor Swift and NVIDIA case studies. Explore the official Blue Ocean Strategy website and its free strategy toolkit.
Explore the newer case studies
Taylor Swift: A Blue Ocean Strategist in the Entertainment Industry, INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute.
NVIDIA’s Market-Creating Blue Ocean Moves, INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute.
From Harvard Business Review
The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, Kevin Evers.
Blue Ocean Leadership, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.
Closing the Gap Between Blue Ocean Strategy and Execution, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.
Listen
What Is Blue Ocean Strategy, and Where Does It Go Wrong?, HBR On Strategy podcast.
To reflect on
Where am I competing harder when I should be questioning the rules of the competition?
What assumptions about my role, team, or organization have I stopped challenging?
What are we doing simply because it’s how things have always been done?
Where might there be unmet needs or overlooked opportunities?
What could we eliminate, reduce, raise, or create to deliver greater value?
If we were building our organization, team, or leadership approach from scratch today, what would we do differently?
Sometimes the next opportunity isn’t about working harder within the boundaries we’ve inherited.
It’s about having the curiosity and courage to question those boundaries.
If you’re ready for that next step, I’d love to hear your story. Schedule your complimentary Discovery Call.
Kristen Hodge, Executive Coach & Transformation Partner
Simple Details | Coaching & Consulting
Connection • Alignment • Growth
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