Blue Ocean Leadership
Developed by Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne, it provides a systematic way to unlock the ocean of unrealised talent and energy in your organisation,
FAST and at LOW COST
It achieves this while conserving leaders’ most precious resource:
TIME
Blue Ocean Leadership
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The Blue Ocean Leadership Opportunity
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The Blue Ocean Leadership Opportunity
Question: How large is the blue ocean leadership opportunity?
Answer: LARGEIn a study of 25 000 executives and employees the Gallup "State of the Workplace Report" found that:
A mere 30% of employees are engaged, committed to doing a good job.
50% of employees merely put their time in.
And 20% are counterproductive, negatively influencing coworkers, missing days at work and driving customers away through poor service.The 20% of counterproductive employees alone cost the USA economy about half a trillion a year.
What is the cost of disengaged people in your organisation?
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Key Differences from Conventional Leadership Approaches
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Key Differences from Conventional Leadership Approaches
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Blue Ocean Leadership and YOU
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Blue Ocean Leadership and YOU
Blue ocean Leadership applies to all organisations which have an ocean disengaged employees and need a step change in leadership strength
Specifically, Blue Ocean Leadership applies to:
- Corporations
- Non-profits
- Governments
- And across small, medium and large size organisations
You don’t have to wait for your organisation to start a blue ocean leadership initiative.
You can start in your own unit with the people you lead.
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The Theory of Blue Ocean Leadership
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The Theory of Blue Ocean Leadership
The insight for Blue Ocean Leadership developped by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne is that leadership, essence can be thought of as a service that people in an organistion either "buy" or "don't buy".
- Every leader in that sense has customers: bosses to whom the leader must deliver performance and followers who need the leader’s guidance and support to achieve.
- When people value your leadership practices, they in effect buy your leadership and are inspired to excel and act with commitment. But when employees don’t buy your leadership, they disengage, becoming noncustomers of your leadership.
- Once we started thinking about leadership in this way, we saw that the concepts and frameworks we were developing to create new demand in the field of strategy could be adapted to help leaders convert disengaged employees into engaged ones.
- Every leader in that sense has customers: bosses to whom the leader must deliver performance and followers who need the leader’s guidance and support to achieve.
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Putting Blue Ocean Leadership into Action
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Putting Blue Ocean Leadership into Action
Blue ocean leadership involves a four step process developed by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne that allows leaders to gain a clear understanding of just what changes it would take to bring out the best in their people, while conserving their most precious resource: TIME
- It puts as much emphasis on what acts and activities leaders should eliminate and reduce in what they do as on what they should raise and create to become highly effective leaders.
- Blue ocean leaders win because their plates are cleared of low value activities so that they are free to lead and focus on what matters centrally. Employees win because they are now getting the leadership they need to succeed.
- Blue ocean leadership uses analytic tools like the Leadership Canvas and the Blue Ocean Leadership Grid to make this happen. These highly visual tools allow leaders and organizations to see, measure and track leadership changes in a real way which is much more practical and easier than trying to track changes in a leader’s values and behavioral traits.
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A Case in Point
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A Case in Point
A British Retail Group (BRG) applied Blue Ocean Leadership to redefine what effectiveness meant for frontline, midlevel and senior leaders.
By getting everyone involved in redefining what leaders should be doing the results were rapid and significant. In the space of the first year in the frontline alone:
- Employee turnover of its 10,000 plus frontline employees dropped from about 40% to 11%
- Recruitment and training costs reduced by 50%
- Customer satisfaction rose by over 30%
- And the group saved more than $50 million
For leaders it was a real ‘win’ since they eliminated and reduced acts and activities which they found tedious and draining. And employees re-engaged because they were led to do what they needed to do to succeed.
The group’s as-is Leadership Canvases revealed how disengaged their people were. They gave each canvas a summary tagline. The tagline for frontline leaders was ‘Please the Boss’, for middle managers it was ‘Control and Play Safe’ and for senior managers it was ‘Focus on the Day-to-Day’.
In contrast, the to-be Leader Profiles are shown below in three separate canvases with each juxtaposing the as-is Leadership Profile of each level with their new to-be Leadership Profile. Click on the below boxes to see each of these
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FRONTLINE MANAGERS
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The Leadership Canvas of BRG's Frontline Managers
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MIDLEVEL MANAGERS
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The Leadership Canvas of BRG's Midlevel Managers
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SENIOR MANAGERS
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The Leadership Canvas of BRG's Senior Managers
Quote
Patrick Snowball
Former CEO
Suncorp Group
There is absolutely no doubt that Blue Ocean Leadership has been an enormous benefit to us. Five years ago we initiated a multipronged operational and market-driven transformation of the Group. Faced with multiple merged organisations we used Blue Ocean Leadership as a key component to creating a common vibrant approach to leadership to rapidly drive change. Leaders got to immediately eliminate and reduce lower value actions giving them the time to focus on re-engaging our people to make a leap in customer care and operational efficiency. It is difficult to remember how tricky things were. The statistics speak for themselves. Our employee engagement scores continue to rise dramatically with leadership scores now at 82%, which is 12% above the high global performance norm, and 84% of our employees now feeling proud to work at Suncorp. We have certainly turned things around here. For me, the relentless focus on removing blockages to people...
Read MorePatrick Snowball
Former CEO
Suncorp Group
Articles on Blue Ocean Leadership
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Blue Ocean Leadership Managerial Articles by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, the creators of Blue Ocean Leadership
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Blue Ocean Leadership Managerial Articles
BLUE OCEAN LEADERSHIP
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, Harvard Business Review.
May 2014.Ten years ago, two INSEAD professors broke ground by introducing “blue ocean strategy,” a new model for discovering uncontested markets that are ripe for growth. In this article, they apply their concepts and tools to what is perhaps the greatest challenge of leadership: closing the gulf between the potential and the realised talent and energy of employees.
Research indicates that this gulf is vast: According to Gallup, 70% of workers are disengaged from their jobs. If companies could find a way to convert them into engaged employees, the results could be transformative. The trouble is, managers lack a clear understanding of what changes they could make to bring out the best in everyone. Here, Kim and Mauborgne offer a solution to that problem: a systematic approach to uncovering, at each level of the organisation, which leadership acts and activities will inspire employees to give their all, and a process for getting managers throughout the company to start doing them.
Blue ocean leadership works because the managers’ “customers”—that is, the people managers oversee and report to—are involved in identifying what’s effective and what isn’t. Moreover, the approach doesn’t require leaders to alter who they are, just to undertake a different set of tasks. And that kind of change is much easier to implement and track than changes to values and mind-sets.
From Blue Ocean Strategy to Blue Ocean Leadership
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Knowledge.
September 16, 2014.The same way that blue ocean strategy can create uncontested market space, blue ocean leadership can unleash oceans of untapped talent and employee potential in organisations. The series of blog posts on the INSEAD Knowledge by Kim and Mauborgne will explore how blue ocean leadership differs from conventional leadership approaches and explain each of the four steps to put blue ocean leadership into practice.
The Four Pillars of Blue Ocean Leadership
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Knowledge.
September 23, 2014.To unleash employees’ untapped talent and energy, leaders need a strong repertoire of actions, not just better awareness and empathy. In this blog post Kim and Mauborgne, the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, explore the four ways in which blue ocean leadership fundamentally departs from conventional leadership development approaches and why these differences make a difference to achieving a step change in leadership strength fast and at low cost.
How to See Your Current Leadership Reality
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Knowledge.
October 1, 2014.Without a common understanding of where leadership stands today and is falling short, a forceful case for change cannot be made. In this blog post Kim and Mauborgne, the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, explore the first of four steps to putting Blue Ocean Leadership into practice – ‘see your leadership reality.’
How to Develop and Select Your New Leadership Profiles
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Knowledge.
October 7, 2014.The Blue Ocean Leadership Grid can be used to identify what leadership acts and activities should be eliminated, reduced, raised, and created in pursuit of high impact at low cost.
How to Institutionalise Your New Blue Ocean Leadership Practices
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Knowledge.
October 14, 2014.After identifying what leadership acts and activities should be eliminated, reduced, raised and created to achieve a step change in leadership strength in your organisation, it’s time to institutionalise your new leadership profiles.
A Conversation On Blue Ocean Leadership
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Knowledge.
October 21, 2014.A Conversation on Blue Ocean Leadership is now available on INSEAD Knowledge. In this interview, authors Kim and Mauborgne answer key questions on the theory, application, and impact of Blue Ocean Leadership.
The Mind Map of Blue Ocean Leadership
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Knowledge.
November 13, 2014.Releasing the ocean of untapped talent and energy of employees is something few companies can afford not to do. Visualising blue ocean leadership in comparison to conventional leadership practices will help you with implementation.
