When Blue Ocean Ideas Dry Up

There’s a leadership pattern I’ve encountered enough times to recognize it immediately. A senior leader — energized, well-read, probably just back from a conference or deep in an industry newsletter — arrives at a compelling new strategic direction. It’s exciting. It’s differentiated. It might genuinely be right.

And then it gets handed to a team that had no part in developing it, to execute against timelines that weren’t informed by anyone who knows the actual workload, using resources that weren’t part of the original thinking.

The idea doesn’t fail because it was a bad idea. It fails because the process that produced it — the leader alone, or a small senior group, working in isolation from the people who will actually have to make it real — guaranteed a gap between what was imagined and what was possible. That gap is where good strategies go to die.

This post is about that gap, and specifically about what Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Leadership framework offers as a structural solution. It’s also about what happens when leaders mistake idea-generation for strategy-making — and what Richard Rumelt’s work on bad strategy has to say about the difference.

Let me be specific about what I’ve seen happen in practice, including in marketing functions where I’ve worked directly.

A leadership team decides to pivot the content strategy. Or reposition the brand. Or restructure the team around a new channel. The decision is announced in an all-hands. The managers are handed the initiative. And somewhere in the handoff, no one has asked three questions that will determine whether any of this actually works:

These aren’t process questions. They’re leadership questions. And they’re exactly the questions that Blue Ocean Leadership is designed to address.

Most people familiar with Blue Ocean Strategy know it as a framework for market positioning — the idea that creating uncontested market space is more valuable than fighting over existing territory. Blue Ocean Leadership applies the same logic to how leaders allocate their time and energy.

The central observation is striking in its simplicity: organizations consistently find that 20 to 40 percent of what leaders spend their time on adds little or no value to the people above and below them — while simultaneously underinvesting in the 20 to 40 percent of activities that would most energize and enable their teams. Kim and Mauborgne call these cold spots and hot spots respectively.

The four-part Leadership Grid that follows asks leaders to identify, for each level of management, which acts and activities should be eliminated, reduced, raised, or created. The insight isn’t abstract: it’s grounded in direct input from the people experiencing the leadership, both above and below.

This is the part of the framework that most leadership initiatives miss entirely. The grid isn’t designed to be filled in by the senior team in a strategy session. It’s designed to be built from interviews — real conversations with the people whose performance the leadership is supposed to be enabling.

Kim and Mauborgne describe the execution engine behind Blue Ocean Leadership as fair process — a concept built on three interlocking principles: engagement, explanation, and expectation clarity.

Engagement means that the people who will be affected by a decision are meaningfully consulted in shaping it — not informed after the fact, but actually heard before the call is made. Explanation means that even when the final decision doesn’t reflect every input, the reasoning behind it is communicated clearly and honestly. Expectation clarity means that what is expected of everyone going forward is stated explicitly, not implied.

These principles matter because of what they produce: trust. And trust, as Kim and Mauborgne note, is what converts a leader-follower relationship from compliance to commitment. Compliance means people do what they’re told because they have to. Commitment means people bring their actual judgment and energy to the work because they feel genuinely invested in the outcome.

The distinction matters enormously in the execution phase of any strategic initiative. A team executing under compliance will meet the letter of the plan when things are going well and retreat to minimum viable effort when they get hard. A team executing under commitment will solve problems the plan didn’t anticipate, flag issues before they become crises, and carry the initiative forward even when leadership isn’t in the room.

No one builds commitment by announcing a strategy. They build it by running a fair process.

UCLA management professor Richard Rumelt has written with great precision about why organizational strategies fail — and his diagnosis applies directly to the top-down pattern described above.

Rumelt identifies four hallmarks of bad strategy. The first is the failure to face the problem: a strategy that doesn’t clearly diagnose what challenge it’s actually solving isn’t a strategy, it’s a list of aspirations. The second is mistaking goals for strategy: announcing ‘we will double our content output this year’ is not a strategy; it’s a target with no mechanism attached.

The third hallmark is bad strategic objectives — objectives that are so vague or so grandiose that they provide no actual guidance for the people trying to execute against them. And the fourth is fluff: the language of strategy used to cover the absence of it. Rumelt describes this as ‘a veneer of strategy-speak’ that gives the appearance of direction without the substance.

What Rumelt calls the kernel of good strategy has three parts: a diagnosis that defines the challenge, a guiding policy that identifies the approach for dealing with it, and a set of coherent actions that actually coordinate resources and effort around that approach. The kernel is almost impossible to produce without input from the people closest to the work — because the diagnosis requires understanding what’s actually happening on the ground, not just what it looks like from the executive layer.

This is where Blue Ocean Leadership and Rumelt’s framework converge. Both insist, in different ways, that strategy is not something leaders generate and hand down. It’s something leaders facilitate — by creating the conditions, the process, and the conversation that produces decisions grounded in reality.

There’s one more framework worth naming here, because it addresses the specific moment when a leader brings a strategic idea to their management team and meets resistance.

Fisher and Ury, in Getting to Yes, draw a distinction between positions and interests. A position is what someone says they want. An interest is why they want it — the underlying need, concern, or constraint that the position is trying to address. Most leadership disagreements about strategy are negotiated at the level of positions, when the actual leverage is in the interests.

A director who says ‘I don’t think we can do this in Q2’ is stating a position. The interest underneath might be ‘my team is already at capacity from the initiative we’re still finishing from last quarter.’ A leader who hears the position and tries to overcome it — with data, with a reframed timeline, with an appeal to authority — is missing the real information. A leader who hears the position and asks about the interest has just learned something that will make the strategy better.

This is what fair process looks like in practice. Not consensus for its own sake, but genuine engagement with the knowledge that lives closest to the work.

In marketing specifically, the top-down strategy gap shows up in a few consistent patterns:

In every one of these cases, the problem isn’t that the strategic thinking was wrong. It’s that the process that produced it wasn’t designed to surface what the people closest to the work already knew — which is always more than leadership assumes.

The fix isn’t a longer strategy process. It’s a better one. Use the Blue Ocean Leadership Grid as a facilitation tool: ask your managers, before the next strategic initiative, what their teams find most energizing and most draining about how leadership currently shows up. Ask what they’d eliminate, reduce, raise, or create. Then build that input into the strategy before it’s final.

You won’t always agree. You shouldn’t always agree. But the people who disagree with the final call, having been genuinely heard during the process, will execute the decision with a fundamentally different quality of effort than the people who simply received it.

References

1. Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. “Blue Ocean Leadership.” Harvard Business Review, May 2014, 60–72. https://hbr.org/2014/05/blue-ocean-leadership
2. Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005. https://hbr.org/2004/10/blue-ocean-strategy
3. Rumelt, Richard. “The Perils of Bad Strategy.” McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-perils-of-bad-strategy
4. Fisher, Roger, and William Ury. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. 2nd ed. New York: Random House Business Books, 1991. Session content, University of Tampa BUS 698, Fall 2024.
5. Chrysalis Consulting. “Blue Ocean Strategy to Blue Ocean Leadership.” Session 8, University of Tampa BUS 698 Leadership Development Program, Fall 2024. Facilitated by Susan Steiner.
6. University of Tampa, TECO Energy Center for Leadership. BUS 698: Modern Advances in Leadership. Sykes College of Business, Fall 2024. https://www.ut.edu/academics/sykes-college-of-business/centers-and-institutes/teco-energy-center-for-leadership/leadership-development-programs
7. For additional reading on strategic facilitation and participatory planning, see: Lencioni, Patrick. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002. https://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions