As a Businessman, I have been sold on the Blue Ocean Strategy, a strategy to create and capture “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth.  The book has sold over a million copies and is almost a bible for many companies in growing their markets.

I am very much amused by the use of blogger, Scoble where I read about the Boil the Ocean Strategy.

Whether it is coined in derision, it does seem to hit the mark that this is what most entrepreneurs do.  I hear a lot of business plans, and what many attempt to do is to create a business for which:

a.) they either take on established big players.  it is fine to dream big, but it is another to try to come up with a business that competes with the giants in their turf and in their expertise, like competing in search with Google, or compete in mp3 players against Apple.

b.) they create a business on which success depends on their being suddenly ‘discovered’ or succeed in a big way.  For instance, if you are trying to become a successful blogger, and you are starting from scratch, and success depends on your having 5,000 page views a day, you have to analyze the possibility of your being able to make it.

This therefore becomes a business in which success depends on the stars aligning together, that means on many small things happening exactly the way it is supposed to be - like clockwork.  I guess you know that if your business will only grow if this happens, then that happens, then this person says yes, and that person says go, then you are trying to create a situation which probabilities are working against your odds.

For instance, if your being a successful blogger means that you will need to make 2,000 friends, get 500 links, as well as a host of A+ bloggers singing accolades and endorsing what you write, as well as getting a Google Page Rank of at least 5, winning 2 blog awards, and then your being able to write successful post regularly that not only gets traffic, and sustains the readers interest, with the intented results that people will notice your ads and click on them,  then you are in for a pretty tough fight.

After all, when you throw a coin, you have a 50 50 chance of getting heads or tails.  But you only have a 3 percent chance of getting 5 heads in a row.

The Disruptive Entrepreneur’s Dilemma « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger

Don’t try to boil the ocean, just pick off a small bucket of water, boil that first, then work on the ocean later.