How everyone can swim in a blue ocean
In this post, I want to show an example of how to apply business ideas from the “Blue Ocean Strategy” book to your personal career. The book is about business, but surprisingly it’s just as relevant for building your personal career and your personal brand. It does not matter if you are a CEO of a big corporation, an entrepreneur, or an employee. You are always better off by swimming in blue oceans.
Blue and red oceans are metaphors used by the authors. The red ocean is the typical business environment. It is a survival battlefield and red is the blood that fills it. The blue ocean is an antithesis of the red one. It is the clean waters of unexplored territories.
Why I’m writing about it? After I finished reading the book, I understood that I’ve been using this approach my whole life. I used it in hobbies, studies, career, and even dating. Most of the time it worked well. And even when it did not, it was a lot of fun.
Main idea.
The main point of the book is that it’s easier to be the best by creating your own niche instead of competing with others in existing areas. “Blue Ocean Strategy” is related to “Zero-To-One” by Peter Thiel, “Skip the line” by James Altucher, “First, Break All The Rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, and “Abundance, The Future is Better Than You Think” by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler among others.
The common wisdom says that to become the best in your field you have to work harder than everyone else. You have to put in crazy working hours and devote yourself to the organization you work for or to your business.
The common wisdom is not wrong. Indeed, if you work hard enough, you will achieve more than anyone else. But you will pay for it. Eighty-hour work weeks are guaranteed to deprive you of personal life, hobbies, friends, and eventually of energy required to work. Moreover, there is always a chance that someone more ambitious and success-hungry than you will be willing to put in even more hours and eventually outperform you.
The real wisdom is to be not just better, but different. How? Read on.
Strategy canvas framework
The backbone of the framework is the strategy canvas. The strategy canvas is a graph where x-axis represents skills and characteristics valued in your profession and y-axis represents how you and others score on those skills. The idea is to make sure that your profile on the canvas differs from your peers.
The image above shows the strategy canvas of Southwest Airlines (the example is from the book). You can see that it differs both from the average airlines and other transportation methods (cars).
If you are a software developer, the skills might be knowledge of modern languages, ability to troubleshoot and debug, analytical skills, big data, understanding of engineering best practices, knowledge of agile methodology, presentation skills, time management, etc.
The whole process can be summarized in the following four steps:
Step 1: Choose what skills are relevant in your profession. Start with googling for “skills required for X”. Add your own experience. Think about how your company reviews and promotes people.
Step 2: Understand how you, your peers, and the rest of the world grade on those skills. Start with grading the peers at your company. If you know people from other companies, add them to the canvas too. Then grade the people who inspire you — famous developers, start-up founders, etc. Finally, add yourself. Be honest and don’t overvalue yourself.
Step 3: Decide where you want to be on the canvas one — three years from now. This is the most important part. You have to decide where you should be the best, where you can afford to be average or even below.
Several tricks to help you with the decision:
- You are not going to be the best everywhere. You can definitely nail a single skill, i.e. be the source of knowledge of optimization in your company. You can probably be the best in two areas, but hardly in three or more.
- Don’t choose areas where there are already great specialists. This is the point of the blue ocean strategy — do not waste your time on the competition.
- Think about the specialist vs. generalist dilemma. If there are many narrow specialists in your field, it’s good to be a generalist, i.e. someone who knows a bit about everything.
- Consider both hard and soft skills. If your company is full of smart nerds unable to communicate, be the presenter and the communicator.
- Look around and consider adding fields on the periphery of your field. For instance, as a software developer you may learn UI so that the next time when your team needs a UI solution, you don’t need to look for an outsourcer.
Step 4: Work on achieving the desired profile. The main challenge here is to achieve the subtle balance between following your decision and listening to feedback. The world — friends, colleagues, boss — will often try to bring you closer to how they think you should be. It is ok to listen to their feedback. Often, they are right. You may choose to focus on the wrong skills. You may lack essential knowledge that you should acquire before further self-development. But often, they will just pull you to the average they are familiar with.
Summary
Everyone likes to be the best. You can become the best through hard work and long hours. You can also become the best through smart work and carving your own niche. It is your choice.
