Blue Ocean Strategy

How to create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

Market space is composed of two sorts of oceans : red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans represent all the industries in existence today. Blue oceans represent all the industries that are not in existence today. This is known as unknown market space. In the red ocean, industry boundaries are defined and accepted and competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a share of existing demand. As the market space get crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities and cutthroat competition turns the red ocean bloody. Blue ocean in contrast are defined by untapped market space, demand creation and the opportunity for highly profitable growth. Industries never stand still they continuously evolve. Value innovation is the cornerstone of the blue ocean strategy. Instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on creating a leap in value for buyers and your company thereby opening up new and uncontested market space. The book explains how to blue oceans are created and how businesses of tomorrow will survive on the key thing - differentiation.

Naked Truth

A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters

By Margaret Hefferman

We work for many reasons : to pay our expenses, to develop our talents, to build self esteem, to be financially independent, to make contribution to the world, to have financial security for our retirement. Even at its most work develops who we are, what we care about and how we relate to the world. Author try to explain through various examples that it takes a lot of confidence to fight your way through toxic environments and hostile industries. It is necessary to question ourselves at times that do we feel threatened at work and do you know how to tell what is the problem or you feel afraid about it. Also learning not to ask for things can devastate woman's abilities to reach their goals. Women many times do not ask because they cling to the belief that hard work and pleasant demeanor will garner raises and promotions but sometimes they don't. Author illustrates various strategies which high achieving women set for themselves and kind of skills which they need to build for continuous success and survival at work places

Making Process Improvement Work

A concise action guide for software managers and practitioners

Software process improvement too often reflects disconnect between theory and practice. This book bridges the gap giving neat approach to software improvements programs that really work.
It gives important strategies for deploying organizational change and essential metrics for tracking your progress. Some of the things are like - Scope and develop improvement plan. Identify and give priority to risks and derive metrics that accurately measure progress toward business goals. Sell your improvement program in house, initially target practitioners and projects most open to new approaches and techniques. Align the actions of managers and use existing resources to speed deployment. Checking progress is an essential activity that provides the organization with feedback during execution of improvement program. Keep measuring defect density and end user customer satisfaction. Determine the primary business goals and problems to your group. Identify potential problems with action plan and plan to mitigate the highest priority risks.