Agility towards more blue oceans
I was s reading a blog post the other day, and I came cross one of the most succesful (IMHO) metaphors about business and competition: Red and Blue Oceans.
In a few words (borrowing the description from wikipedia ):
“[…]
The metaphor of red and blue oceans describes the market universe.
Red Oceans are all the industries in existence today—the known market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of product or service demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities or niche, and cutthroat competition turns the ocean bloody. Hence, the term red oceans.
Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored.
[…]”
Well, I think that the core concept of agility has a lot to do with the business behvior that can lead to the target metaphorically described as the quest for sailing first in a blue ocean (leaving the red bloody seas behind).
The tight feedback loop that is achieved through agile methodologies serves the business in a lot of different ways than just getting things done and delivering business value to the customer in shorter timeframes and lower costs. Close contact with the customer means significantly higher probability of getting the right business message (the “map” that leads to the next blue ocean) in time, before your competitors.
Every customer is (in the majority of the cases) a valuable representative of their business domain, and his emerging need (which you can foresee via the feedback loop) may be a hint for a new product or service, a “sea” your company can sail to while it’s still “blue”.
