Tipping-Point Leadership
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| Renée Mauborgne is an affiliate professor of Strategy at INSEAD, The INSEAD Distinguished Fellow of Strategy and International Management, and co-director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute along with her colleague, W. Chan Kim. | |
The third hurdle is the motivational hurdle. In today’s environment of shrinking bonuses and mass layoffs, how can managers motivate employees?
For a new strategy to be executed effectively, people must not only recognize what needs to be done, they must also have the motivation to act on that insight in a sustained and meaningful way. This point is especially critical today, as companies are going through strategic adjustments or changes – some of them necessary evils – to survive and overcome the adverse economic conditions. Tipping-point leadership aims to motivate employees quickly and at low cost. To achieve this, leaders must ask, Who are our key influencers -- our ‘kingpins’? How can we focus the spotlight on and manage them based on fair process? By focusing on factors of disproportionate influence in motivating employees, including kingpins, managers can avoid the conventional pitfalls of launching massive top-down mobilization initiatives that are usually inefficient and ineffective, and instead execute a strategic transformation quickly and at low cost.
The fourth and final hurdle facing change-driven managers is the political hurdle of internal and external resistance to change. How should this be tackled?
Organizational politics is an inescapable reality. Even if a firm has reached the tipping point of execution, powerful vested interests likely exist that will resist the impending changes. The question is, how can you identify and silence internal opponents to change? To overcome this hurdle, leaders should ask, Who will fight me and who will align with the new strategy? Have I built coalitions with natural allies to ‘encircle’ dissidents? Do I have a ‘consigliere’ to remove the biggest land mines so that I don’t have to focus on changing those who will not change? By focusing on three disproportionate influence factors -- leveraging ‘angels’, silencing ‘devils’ and getting a consigliere on the top management team -- leaders can leap over the political hurdle.
Creating uncontested market space is no easy feat. Are enough firms embracing ‘value innovation’?
First of all, the history of industry evolution itself is a history of blue ocean creation. All we have done is distill the strategic logic of value innovation and identify the pattern of blue ocean moves from corporate practice, based on our historical studies of more than 150 strategic moves from 1880 to 2000 in more than 30 industries. Blue oceans of uncontested market space have always been pursued and created by companies; it is amid such numerous blue ocean strategic moves that industries expand and multiply and economies grow and prosper.
After our book came out and became an international bestseller, more and more organizations across the globe have begun to apply these frameworks and tools to their practice. For those who are interested, our Blue Ocean Strategy Newsletter is available for free.
It regularly reports from around the world on companies applying BOS as well as practitioners who have been inspired by the book. So yes, we have seen a great number of firms embracing Blue Ocean Strategy, and the number continues to grow.
What is next on the horizon for you and your co-author, W. Chan Kim?
Blue Ocean Strategy is not only about theoretical thinking. It is but also about actionable frameworks and tools for practice. We believe that theory and practice should inspire, enrich and inform one another to maximize mutual gain and advancement for the benefit of all, and we are dedicated to making contributions to both fronts.
In the book we mainly focused on providing frameworks and methodologies for companies to undertake BOS moves and create new market space. But in fact, the strategic logic and analytical frameworks of BOS can be applied in both corporate environments and public organizations and can be employed to formulate and execute strategies for individuals, businesses and nations. In the past few years, we have been studying applications of Blue Ocean Strategy in different types of organizations and at different levels. To this end, INSEAD created the Blue Ocean Strategy Institute to advance academic research and practical applications of BOS. The Institute has an ambitious, two-pronged mission to both contribute to the fields of strategy and management through academic research and to help improve the practice and the performance of companies, governments, and organizations around the world through the practical application of these ideas in action.
In the meantime, numerous blue ocean strategy initiatives are going on around the globe. For instance, the Kimberly-Clark Blue Ocean Strategy Institute has been set up by Kimberly-Clark in Sao Paulo, Brazil to help companies achieve value innovation; and the Malaysia Blue Ocean Strategy Institute has been set up by the Malaysian government to advance its economy and national mission. BOS is also moving into business school classrooms. Today, many such schools are swimming in the red ocean of bloody competition by benchmarking and imitating one another, especially the practices of top Western business schools.
A good example of such red ocean practice is a typical MBA classroom discussion based on a paper case. Assigning a paper case to both executives and MBA students in preparation for classroom discussion is not that effective. Reading scores of pages a night is difficult for most students, which slows down the uptake of information and the rate of learning in a meaningful way. To help business schools break away from this red ocean, our Institute has been producing a series of next-generation blue ocean teaching materials such as theory-based movie cases, interactive scenario cases, simulations, e-learning and ‘createware’ to make the classroom experience more interactive and spontaneous so as to accelerate learning. Information on these and other available materials can be found under the Teaching Tools section of our Website .
Renée Mauborgne is an affiliate professor of Strategy at INSEAD, The INSEAD Distinguished Fellow of Strategy and International Management, and co-director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute along with her colleague, W. Chan Kim. She is the co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business Press, 2005), which has sold over two million copies worldwide and broken HBSP's record for translation into the most languages (41). Thinkers 50, the global ranking of management gurus, placed her among the top ten most influential thinkers in 2007, making her the highest placed woman on the ranking.
[This article has been reproduced with permission from Rotman Magazine, published by the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.]
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