Blue Ocean Strategy is another book in the sea of business strategy books. Sorry, bad pun. There are plenty of books that deal with developing strategy for competing in your existing markets, but what caught my attention with this book was Blue Ocean Strategy's focus on developing strategy in new, nonexistent markets.

The book starts with a descriptive approach and details a series of cases. Many of these companies found seams between markets to create new ones. Some examples include NetJets, NABI (Hungry), QB House (Japan), and Curves. For Curves, it was finding room between the do-it-yourself exercise market of books and videos and traditional health and fitness clubs:

"Since franchising began in 1995, Curves has grown like wildfire, acquiring more than two million customers, in more than six thousand locations, with total revenues exceeding the $1 billion mark...Curves built its blue ocean strategy by drawing on the distinctive strengths of these two strategic groups, eliminating and reducing everything else. Curves has eliminated all the aspects of the traditional health club that are of little interest to the broad mass of women. Gone are the profusion of special machines, food, spa, pool and even locker rooms, which have been replaced by a few curtained-off changing rooms."

You will find an equal amount of prescriptive how-to advice in the latter half of the book. Kim and Maubornge are big fans of the strategy canvas tool (a graphical tool for comparing customer-defined attributes among companies). You'll find out how to leverage the six types of buyer utility and understand the price corridor of the mass. They also spend time telling you how to talk to your employees, your shareholders, and your customers about blue ocean changes.

I don't recommend very many hard-core strategy titles, so that should give you some idea of what I think about the book. If you want to read an excerpt from Blue Ocean Strategy, visit http://www.800ceoread.com/excerpts. (Coming Soon)

BTW, IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN GETTING THE FREE MONTHLY REVIEWS I DO, JUST EMAIL ME AT JACK AT 800CEOREAD DOT COM AND I'LL PUT YOU ON THE LIST.

There are two basic types of business books - descriptive and prescriptive. I gravitate toward the prescriptive. I like books that give 10 ways to solve a problem. Many business book readers are the same. They want a "how to" book to get them started. The Marketing Playbook by John Zagula and Richard Tong fits into this category perfectly.

While at Microsoft, the authors noticed patterns in the marketing plans the company was implementing. The main thing was there weren't many variations to the plans. In the book, they describe five "marketing plays" that will works for any situation. They have given them easy to remember names (Drag Race, Stealth, Best of Both, High-Low, and Platform). They describe in detail how to run each play, how to identify which play to run, and what play to run if the current one starts to fail. As venture capitalists with Ignition Partners, they now use this technique with every company that comes through their doors looking for funding.

The authors of this book, Zagula and Tong, wrote it because they were told repeatedly by colleagues that there is a need for:

" a helpful, straightforward marketing guide rather than the hype, buzzwords, or academic theory they typically see. They told us that they would like to read a book that not only shows them how to gain and hold on to their rightful leadership position but also helps them repeat the process over and over, a book they could believe, a book whose methods and suggestions have been proven in the heat of battle, a book written by people who knew from experience how to attain and retain the lead in a market but who also knew how to make the process easy to follow and implement."

So if you want to play like the big dogs, here is your Playbook. It's obviously not only a great first read, but also a book that you will return to again and again.