Executing Blue Ocean Strategy

Executing Blue Ocean Strategy

By:


The Los Angeles Police Department is responsible for protecting 3.8 million people over a large, 465 square mile area. After successfully reducing crime in New York City as its police chief in the 1990s, Bill Bratton joined LAPD as chief in 2002.

Companies and organizations such as the LAPD, like individuals, often have a tough time translating thought into action whether in red oceans or blue oceans. In comparison with red ocean strategy, blue ocean strategy represents a significant departure from the status quo.

The fifth principle of Blue Ocean Strategy is to overcome key organizational hurdles to make Blue Ocean Strategy happen in action. In the case of Bill Bratton and the LAPD the execution bar was raised and a shift from the status quo was evident. Bratton flipped the conventional wisdoms of previous law enforcement efforts and applied greater leadership.

Bratton repeated the Blue Ocean Strategies he used in New York by instituting new policies, processes and systems to control and reduce costs and simultaneously deliver a safer, better protected city to the public.

The authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, W.Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, conclude that managers face four hurdles. One is cognitive: waking employees up to the need for a strategic shift. The second hurdle is limited resources. The greater the shift in strategy, the greater it is assumed are the resources needed to execute it. Third is motivation. How do you motivate key players to move fast and tenaciously to carry out a break from the status quo? The final hurdle is politics.

For companies and individuals to overcome these four hurdles they need to apply Tipping Point Leadership. Tipping Point Leadership allows you to overcome these four hurdles fast and at low cost while winning employee backing in executing a break from the status quo.

Tipping Point Leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, mounting a massive challenge is not about putting forth an equally massive response where performance gains are achieved by proportional investments in time and resources. Rather, it is about conserving resources and cutting time by focusing on identifying and then leveraging the factors of disproportionate influence in an organization.

One of the key enablers of Brattons approach was the adoption of the COMPSAT computer statistics system. This made it easier to spot trends and take action to prevent crime by allocating more cops to crime hot spots and notifying at-risk citizens and businesses through flyer and other communications.

Brattons strategy also depended on the leadership and responsibility of his entire force to reduce and respond to crime effectively on a daily basic. He made captains in 19 local areas responsible for their districts crime reduction performance and required them to report results in front of their pees and himself every 8 weeks.

Blue Ocean Strategic move

This increased local accountability and data-driven and continuous performance-improvement focus achieved results even when the department was facing major budge constraints and a lingering negative image from previous corruption and brutality scandals.

Bratton considered how to leverage disproportionate influence factors to tip all four hurdles to move from thought to action in the execution of Blue Ocean Strategy.

The key questions answered by tipping point leaders are as follows: What factors or acts exercise a disproportionately positive influence on breaking the status quo. On getting the maximum bang out of each buck or resources? On motivating key players to aggressively move forward with change? And on knocking down political roadblocks that often trip up even the best strategies? By single-mindedly focusing on points of disproportionate influence, tipping point leaders can topple the four hurdles that limit execution of Blue Ocean Strategy. They can do this fast and at a low cost.

About the Author:
Brendan Murphy is an Associate at Strategize Blue( www.strategizeblue.com). He works under Dr. Zunaira Munir, the internationally acclaimed expert and keynote speaker on Blue Ocean Strategy



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


Tags: , ,

|

Loading...
Related....
Videos...

Recent Business Articles

Comments

Still can't find what you are looking for? Search for it!

Loading

Site Navigation:

Copyright 2005-2011 ArticleSnatch, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service.