Here is a brief excerpt from an article by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne that originally appeared in Harvard Business Review (May 2014), Blue Ocean Leadership, was selected by the HBR Editors to be included in HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2015: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review, published by Harvard Business Review Press (2015).

Kim and Mauborgne suggest that blue ocean leadership focuses on what acts and actions leaders need to undertake to boost their teams’ motivation and business results, not on who leaders need to be. “The difference in emphasis is important. It is markedly easier to change people’s acts and activities than their values, qualities, and behavior traits. Of course, altering a leader’s activities is not a complete solution, and having the right values, qualities, and behavioral traits matters. But activities are something any individual can change, given the right feedback and guidance.”

According to Kim and Mauborgne, there are four steps involved when putting blue ocean leadership into practice. They explain each in the HBR article reprinted in HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2015 (Pages 89-107). Here are the four steps:

1. See your leadership reality
2. Develop alternative leadership styles
3. Select to-be leadership styles
4. Institutionalize new business practices

With regard to acts and activities that leaders now invest their time and intelligence in:

o Which should be eliminated?
o Which should be reduced well below their current level?
o Which should be raised well above their current level?
o Which do they do they not currently undertake…but should?

One of the several strengths of blue ocean leadership is its scalability. “You don’t have to wait for your company’s top leadership to launch this process. Whatever management level you belong to, you can awaken the sleeping potential of your people by taking them through the four steps. Are you ready to be a blue ocean leader?”

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Renée Mauborgne and Renée Mauborgne are professors of strategy and management at INSEAD and codirectors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, in Fontainebleu, France. They are also the coauthors of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, Expanded Edition, (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).