Recommended Books for The Scuba Diving Professional

In the dive industry nowadays, we keep on competing, but we are not growing. Perhaps it’s time to make a blue ocean shift! We’ve had that discussion here: A Blue Ocean Strategy in The Scuba Diving Industry.

• Summary of Blue Ocean Strategy (affiliate link) by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne. If you are not sure about diving into the 300 pages of the complete book, this is an excellent 36-page summary.
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (affiliate link) by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne. Principles and tools to create and capture your own blue oceans.
• Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing — Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth (affiliate link) by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne. A follow-up to Blue Ocean Strategy with more examples and research.

Let’s start with the following readings.

• No Thanks, I’m Just Looking: Sales Techniques for Turning Shoppers into Buyers (affiliate link) by Harry J. Friedman. We believe these are the most profitable 241 pages a dive instructor or dive shop staff can read!
• Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (affiliate link) by Michael E. Porter. The ‘Five Forces framework’ is a tool to analyze competitiveness in an industry sector. Once the analysis is done, the goal is to identify a sustainable competitive advantage for your business. Reference article on Scubanomics: Porter’s Five Forces Analysis of The Scuba Diving Industry.
• Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy (affiliate link) by Joan Magretta. A summary of competitive advantage, value chain, five forces, industry structure, differentiation, and relative cost.
• Business of Diving by PADI (affiliate link). It’s out of date, but some of the basic concepts can still be valid.
• Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler (affiliate link): This is pretty much your entry-level bible for understanding marketing.
• Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Henry Mintzberg (affiliate link): In case you want to go wild on strategic planning! I had Mintzberg as a professor in my MBA program. He knows his stuff!

These are books we suggest to develop our abilities to ‘think outside the box.’ We are in dire need of innovation in the scuba diving industry, and these are inspiring stories.

• SwitchPoints: Culture Change on the Fast Track to Business Success (affiliate link) by Peter Edwards & al. How to go from good to great. It starts with company-wide culture change. In our case, we need a dive-industry-wide culture change.
• The Pig That Flew: The battle to privatize Canadian National (affiliate link) by Harry Bruce. One has to think outside the box to convert a government-owned dinosaur from the worse railroad in North America to the role model every other railroad used as a benchmark. Turnarounds are possible.