Here are our latest additions to the DVD collection:
All the Money in the World
The Commuter
My Friend Dahmer
The Greatest Showman
Hostiles
Maze Runner: The Death Cure
Molly’s Game
Peter Rabbit
Phantom Thread
The Post
Proud Mary
Winchester
You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.
Congratulations on completing your Duke MBA! Whether you’re re-entering the working world, or continuing a job search, Ford Library has provided access to a select set of online databases and services that can help you.
Visit our Library web site and select “Alumni” from the top menu row to browse and access our services and online resources for alumni.
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And again, CONGRATULATIONS!
Kim, W. Chan. Blue ocean shift : beyond competing : proven steps to inspire confidence and seize new growth. Hachette Books, 2017.
Blue Ocean Shift (2017) by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne is the follow-up volume to the bestselling Blue Ocean Strategy (2005), which presented the theory that businesses could successfully create both new markets and innovative products simultaneously in highly competitive spaces. In their new book, the authors provide a process for creating and executing the strategy. The first section of the book summarizes blue ocean strategy, emphasizing its distinctiveness and its value, while the second section presents five steps for making a blue ocean shift.
In the course of walking the reader through the five steps, Kim and Mauborgne fill the book with examples and tools to help the blue ocean team – assembled in Step 1 – think outside traditional, competitive business strategy. One of these tools is the Buyer Utility Map, which aids in seeing a product from an outsider perspective. Another is the Six Paths, which encourages the team to look at their product from different perspectives such as across alternative industries or across complementary products, as a way to discover new opportunities. A third is the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Grid which helps to parse out how an organization might transform a product to provide both innovation and cost savings, opening up the proverbial blue ocean market. These tools are just a few examples of the templates, grids and diagrams that Kim and Mauborgne write about to inspire creative thinking about products and markets.
That said, the book does have some weaknesses. First, the authors state that any size organization can execute a blue ocean shift; however, the five steps are heavily focused on implementation in a large organization. Second, the endnotes don’t extend beyond the first section, and the majority of bibliography cites the authors’ previous work. This sparse scholarship appears to indicate that few beyond the authors have studied the strategy in any systematic way in the twelve years since Blue Ocean Strategy was published. Third, while the authors provide real life examples of organizations that have executed the strategy with success, the five steps are generally presented in an idealized way where all the team members play nice together, they have all the support and resources they need, and they have decided the success of the company and of the blue ocean strategy is their highest good.
In sum, the book’s value lies in challenging readers to think differently about their products, their strategy, and their markets while providing a clear process and a number of resources to encourage that thinking.
Blue Ocean Shift is also available on Notable Business Books Kindles and as an OverDrive audiobook.