{ It’s a Blue Ocean Out There }
Wow has there been a lot of sky-is-falling-gloom-and-doom going on this week in the publishing world. And understandably so. But what I heaven’t heard much of–yet anyway–is what an exciting time this is; impetus for the changes that everyone has been lamenting for years as inevitable. Maybe it’s just that we’re still in the midst of the shockwave, but I do hope that once it crests people will begin to see the opportunity.
I read a marvelous book in business school called Blue Ocean Strategy and with all that’s going on I’m pulling it off the shelf once again. Its premise is that most companies out there fight and fight and fight to stake and hold their claim in overpopulated waters. They produce Widget A and sell it to Market Z along with hundreds of others who are doing exactly the same thing (sound familiar?).
What Blue Ocean Strategy challenges us to do is to draw back to the essence of what we offer and find a way to engineer/produce/market/deliver it that sets it apart from the competition entirely. Their case study on Cirque du Soleil–a company that reinvented the circus experience when the traditional three-ring model was so entrenched as to be unquestionable–continues to inspire me; it alone is worth buying the book.
My hope is that those in the publishing industry–even, maybe especially, those who have found themselves cast into the proverbial sea this week–will come to see that it isn’t about selling books. It hasn’t really ever been about selling books. Those in the publishing industry have a unique gift of plucking from the multitude ideas, thoughts, values and concepts of worth and delivering them to the people who long for them (through the words of the authors they work with, of course). What form they’re delivered in is secondary.
My hope is that in the months ahead people will begin to ask not, “how can we go back to what we had?” but “how can we go about this differently to deliver ideas in a way that’s even better than before?” The people behind Cookstr, I believe, asked themselves that question. Call me an optimist, but I can’t wait to see what the ocean looks like three months, six months, a year from now as others do the same.