It’s a great book, well worth reading.  Although the tone is a bit dry, the examples are great.  The book makes you think and wonder how you’ll apply its theories to your everyday work, which is a high compliment.

It’s one of the few books we mention on  a regular basis at HubSpot, which in itself is saying a lot since we’re a bookworm crew.

The strategy canvas and similar metaphor are very useful.  And unlike some of the tools I’ve studied earlier, notably the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) or System Dynamics, the tools in Blue Ocean Strategy give you valuable insights in far less time.  That’s not to say the other tools are bad: they’re good in their own ways, but they often take forever to apply rigorously.

This is an important criterion for me when it comes to modeling, because if the time to model the problem is longer than the time to solve it, your modeling approach is probably not the best fit for the job at hand.  This frequently happens with approaches from the aerospace / defense industries, or other classic long-duration projects, when they’re applied to fast-moving software development.

A very very good book, highly recommended.