Top 40 W. Chan Kim Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.”

— W. Chan Kim

2. “The cost side of a company’s business model ensures that it creates a leap in value for itself in the form of profit – that is, the price of the offering minus the cost of production. It is the combination of exceptional utility, strategic pricing, and target costing that allows companies to achieve value innovation – a.”

— W. Chan Kim

3. “Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.”

— W. Chan Kim

4. “To reach your organization’s tipping point and execute blue ocean strategy, you must alert employees to the need for a strategic shift and identify how it can be achieved with limited resources. For a new strategy to become a movement, people must not only recognize what needs to be done, but they must also act on that insight in a sustained and meaningful way. How.”

— W. Chan Kim

5. “Drawing a strategy canvas is never easy. Even identifying the key factors of competition is far from straightforward. As you will see, the final list is usually very different from the first draft.”

— W. Chan Kim

6. “Blue ocean strategy is not about being first to market. Rather it’s about being first to get it right by linking innovation to value.”

— W. Chan Kim

7. “Focus on the big picture, not the numbers.”

— W. Chan Kim

8. “A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself. Great artists don’t paint from other people’s descriptions or even from photographs; they like to see the subject for themselves. The same is true for great strategists.”

— W. Chan Kim

9. “Shift from convergence to divergence.”

— W. Chan Kim

10. “Blue ocean shift is a systematic process to move your organization from cutthroat markets with bloody competition – what we think of as red oceans full of sharks – to wide-open blue oceans, or new markets devoid of competition, in a way that brings your people along.”

— W. Chan Kim

11. “While good strategy content is based on a compelling value proposition for buyers with a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating-people proposition.”

— W. Chan Kim

12. “To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand.”

— W. Chan Kim

13. “If you can move people by inspiring and building their confidence to own and drive your new strategy, they will be committed to seeing change through and overcoming the organizational constraints you confront.”

— W. Chan Kim

14. “The Pivotal Lever: Disproportionate Influence Factors The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion. Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise.”

— W. Chan Kim

15. “Commitment, trust, and voluntary cooperation are not merely attitudes or behaviors. They are intangible capital. They allow companies to stand apart in the speed, quality, and consistency of their execution and to implement strategic shifts fast at low cost.”

— W. Chan Kim

16. “Partnering, however, provides a way for companies to secure needed capabilities fast and effectively while dropping their cost structure. It allows a company to leverage other companies’ expertise and economies of scale. Partnering includes closing gaps in capabilities through making small acquisitions when doing so is faster and cheaper, providing access to needed expertise that has already been mastered.”

— W. Chan Kim

17. “Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is. And a closer look reveals that most plans don’t contain a strategy at all but rather a smorgasbord of tactics that individually make sense but collectively don’t add up to a unified, clear direction that sets a company apart – let alone makes the competition irrelevant. Does this sound like the strategic plans in your company?”

— W. Chan Kim

18. “The planning process doesn’t produce strategy.”

— W. Chan Kim

19. “Technology is not a defining feature. You can create blue oceans with or without it.”

— W. Chan Kim

20. “We call this atomization after Einstein’s reflection that if you deconstruct any challenge into its basic components, or atoms, and focus on solving them one at a time, even the largest challenge shifts from being overwhelming to being intellectually and psychologically solvable.”

— W. Chan Kim

21. “It immediately flags companies that are focused only on raising and creating and thereby lifting their cost structure and often overengineering products and services – a common plight in many companies.”

— W. Chan Kim

22. “Salespeople on commission, for example, are seldom sensitive to the costs of the sales they produce.”

— W. Chan Kim

23. “Yet few leaders exploit the power of this rapid wake-up call. Rather, they do the opposite. They try to garner support based on a numbers case that lacks urgency and emotional impetus. Or they try to put forth the most exemplary case of their operational excellence to garner support. Although these alternatives may work, neither leads to tipping superiors’ cognitive hurdle as fast and stunningly as showing the worst. When.”

— W. Chan Kim

24. “What are the alternative industries to your industry? Why do customers trade across them? By focusing on the key factors that lead buyers to trade across alternative industries and eliminating or reducing everything else, you can create a blue ocean of new market space.”

— W. Chan Kim

25. “Voluntary cooperation is more than mechanical execution, where people do only what it takes to get by. It involves going beyond the call of duty, wherein individuals exert energy and initiative to the best of their abilities – even subordinating personal self-interest – to execute resulting strategies.3.”

— W. Chan Kim

26. “Given the high potential for free riding, an offering’s reputation must be earned on day one, because brand building increasingly relies heavily on word-of-mouth recommendations spreading rapidly through our networked society.”

— W. Chan Kim

27. “Experiences that don’t involve touching, seeing, or feeling actual results, such as being presented with an abstract sheet of numbers, are shown to be non-impactful and easily forgotten.”

— W. Chan Kim

28. “What is the chain of buyers in your industry? Which buyer group does your industry typically focus on? If you shifted the buyer group of your industry, how could you unlock new value?”

— W. Chan Kim

29. “It is conventionally believed that companies can either create greater value to customers at a higher cost or create reasonable value at a lower cost. Here strategy is seen as making a choice between differentiation and low cost.21 In contrast, those that seek to create blue oceans pursue differentiation and low cost simultaneously.”

— W. Chan Kim

30. “Simply put, there is no substitute for meeting and listening to dissatisfied customers directly.”

— W. Chan Kim

31. “As shown in figure 2-2, to break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost and to create a new value curve, there are four key questions to challenge an industry’s strategic logic and business model: Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard? Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard? Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?”

— W. Chan Kim

32. “As companies compete to embrace customer preferences through finer segmentation, they often risk creating too-small target markets.”

— W. Chan Kim

33. “To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand. Research in neuroscience and cognitive science shows that people remember and respond most effectively to what they see and experience: “Seeing is believing.” In the realm of experience, positive stimuli reinforce behavior, whereas negative stimuli change attitudes and behavior. Simply.”

— W. Chan Kim

34. “Instead of drilling down and finding ways to creatively meet the target cost as Ford did, if companies give in to the tempting route of either bumping up the strategic price or cutting back on utility, they are not on the path to lucrative blue waters.”

— W. Chan Kim

35. “The key here is not to pursue pricing against the competition within an industry but rather to pursue pricing against substitutes and alternatives across industries and nonindustries.”

— W. Chan Kim

36. “The natural strategic orientation of many companies is toward retaining existing customers and seeking further segmentation opportunities. This is especially true in the face of competitive pressure. Although this might be a good way to gain a focused competitive advantage and increase share of the existing market space, it is not likely to produce a blue ocean that expands the market and creates new demand.”

— W. Chan Kim

37. “Focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors.”

— W. Chan Kim

38. “What is the context in which your product or service is used? What happens before, during, and after? Can you identify the pain points? How can you eliminate these pain points through a complementary product or service offering?”

— W. Chan Kim

39. “Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy.”

— W. Chan Kim

40. “Every blue ocean will eventually be imitated and turn red.”

— W. Chan Kim

41. “Blue ocean strategists do not seek to beat the competition. Instead they aim to make the competition irrelevant.”

— W. Chan Kim

42. “Competition is only good up to a point. When supply exceeds demand.”

— W. Chan Kim

43. “The hardest battle is simply to make people aware of the need for a strategic shift and to agree on its causes.”

— W. Chan Kim

44. “Don’t rely on market surveys.”

— W. Chan Kim

45. “Unless the technology makes buyers’ lives dramatically simpler, more convenient, more productive, less risky, or more fun and fashionable, it will not attract the masses no matter how many awards it wins.”

— W. Chan Kim