|||
Steve Denning pens a brilliant blog post on the management methods of the new world.
Misstep #5: Failure to offer something genuinely new
InBlue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant (2005) W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne illustrate the high growth and profits that an organization can generate by creating delighting customers in an uncontested market space, i.e. a “Blue Ocean”, rather than by competing head-to-head with other suppliers in the bloody shark-infested waters (the “Red Ocean”) with known customers in an existing sector.
Instead of choosing to swim with the sharks in head-to-head competition with Facebook, Google could be pursuing a “blue ocean” strategy by competing in a new area where there is little competition.
The key to this approach is to identify a segment of customers whose needs are not being met and generate more value for that segment sooner. Health and energy might have been such opportunities, but Google missed them because it was focused on the producing a thing that people didn’t want, rather than delighting people, by solving a problem, perhaps a problem they didn’t even know they had. The key is to shift from a focus on producing _things_ to a focus on understanding and delighting _people_.
Google needs to rethink its mission, stop thinking about things, and find new areas where it can truly delight its customers. It’s not enough for Google to be a “new” company. To succeed, it has to practice the “new management” of the Creative Economy.