Blue Ocean Leadership

Blue Ocean Leadership was created by world-renowned professors Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The same way that blue ocean strategy can create uncontested market space, blue ocean leadership can unleash the ocean of untapped talent and employee potential in organizations.

Unlike most research in the field of leadership that has largely drawn on psychology and cognitive science, blue ocean leadership developed by Kim and Mauborgne looks to the field of strategy to inform the practice of leadership in business.

What is Blue Ocean Leadership?

Blue Ocean Leadership provides a systematic way to unlock the ocean of unrealized talent and energy in your organization fast and at low cost. It achieves this while conserving leaders’ most precious resource: TIME.

Blue Ocean Leadership in essence, can be thought of as a service that people in an organization either ‘BUY’ or ‘DON’T BUY’.

Conventional Leadership Development Approaches	Blue Ocean Leadership
Focus on the values, qualities and behavioral styles	Focus on acts and activities leaders need to undertake
Detached from market results people are expected to achieve	Leaders’ actions closely connected to market realities
Focus mostly on the executive and senior levels	Distribute leadership across three management levels
Extra time required for leadership practices	High impact leadership acts and activities at low cost

DISENGAGED EMPLOYEES COST YOUR BUSINESS

How large is your ocean of disengaged employees?

How to put Blue Ocean Leadership into practice?

FOLLOW THE FOUR-STEP PROCESS TO CONVERT NONCUSTOMERS INTO CUSTOMERS OF YOUR LEADERSHIP

Blue Ocean Leadership involves a four step process 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

01	See your leadership reality.
02	Develop alternative Leadership Profiles.
03	Select to-be Leadership Profiles.
04	Institutionalize new leadership pratices.

A Case in Point

A British Retail Group (BRG) applied Blue Ocean Leadership to redefine what effectiveness meant for frontline, midlevel and senior leaders.

Let’s get academic

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.