Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

This is a great book, and I don't want my 1 star rating to be considered a reflection on the quality of the content. The problem is that it is not a great audio book. In addition to the original book being very diagram-driven (which never translates well) the reader is, frankly, terrible. His cadence is odd, skipping pauses where they would make sense and addign them seemingly at random. Combined wiht his pronounciation, I ended up double checking to see if it was an actual human being rather than a sophisticated piece of software.

In short: pick up the book. The audiobook will only disappoint.

The print book, Blue Ocean Strategy is intriguing, but highly data-driven, which is very hard to translate into narrative. It is understandable that a narrator might have some difficulty translating this into audio.

If someone like Kotter Smith (The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind) had read it, there would have been a chance for this book in audio format.

Regrettably, the actual narrator (Grover Gardner)was unable to pronounce many words (DOS is not pronounced "dose"), and the stilted delivery he gave was as enthusiastic as Ben Stein's character in Ferris Beuller's Day Off, only worse.

I will studiously avoid purchasing any book he narrates in the future. There's no excuse for selling something that bad.

Bear in mind, I loved the ideas in the book, and I have a print version that I reference now and then, but I can't believe how bad the narration was. I listen to books in the car, but this one I had to take out of my collection because it was putting me to sleep, or driving me nuts with the terrible pronunciations, and inability to follow punctuation.

4 stars for the book, but only 1 for the narrator.

This book is very thought provoking and excellent value. After reading the reviews that panned the narrator, I was waiting for the irregularities in narration other reviewers complained about but... sorry I thought it was very good. No pauses in unusual places, not robotic. Actually I thought the narration was seamless!! The other reviews on this are puzzling. A good audiobook in my view.

One of the best

N/A
The book has case studies and all of them are very enlightening

Don't remember

Learn how to make your competition irrelevant

I would recommend this book to anyone looking to get into business or stuck in the stereo type mentality most businesses are in. If you want to move forward you must stand out from the crowd and create a reason for people to buy or use your services.

There are many books out there that touch upon this subject but fail to get into the detail and give many practical examples of how to create their own blue ocean.

I liked the way that the way that Grover Gardner has covered as many areas and businesses as possible from the most basic to the more complex. Even the most basic looking industries in overcrowded and declining markets with a bit of imagination can find their blue ocean. Grover explains that you don't have to reduce your prices and margins to achieve this. He confirms the theory that most people do not buy goods or services based on price.

As a commercial real estate agent and business broker my blue ocean is Leisure property/business. I am in the process of creating a new web site and business plan for the new year. This book has given me many ideas which I am planning to implement.

I could not get into this book. For such an innovative concept - they chose the most non-innovative approach to deliver their findings. The dryness had me wanting to scrape my skin off. Didn't get past chapter 2.

1) Just a little bit boring.

2) Full of really important stuff.

3) Anyone with 10 years of working experience in the area (i.e., strategy) will have an initial emotional reaction along the lines of, “Yea, Yea, I know all this”, and yet if they focus a little longer (or you push them to show working proficiency) they will usually reveal that they lack deep fluency in “all this”.

4) Simple thesis explained well.

The "narrator's voice" appears to be computer generated text to voice. Many words are laughingly mispronounced. The voice does not sound like other samples of the narrator's true voice. The content is worthwhile.

There appear to be two versions floating around with two different narrators, which may account for the mixed narrator reviews. I listened to the book all the way through and thought the narration was good. After the end, however, the initial chapters started to repeat with an absolutely horrible narrator who did, indeed, sound almost computer generated. I suspect that the initial version of the audiobook may have featured this narrator and it was re-recorded with a new narrator and re-released. Either way, the version I have sounds fine and the content is excellent.

The core concept is good, but they did not have enough content to fill a book. I believe they could have conveyed the entire premise in two chapters. They nearly verbatim repeated themselves, which became quite obnoxious.