Overfished Ocean Strategy:
Powering Up Innovation for a Resource-Deprived World

By Nadya Zhexembayeva, Ph.D.

Businesses need to make resource scarcity-the overfished ocean-their primary strategic consideration in order to survive long term. Managers who deeply understand and master this shift will be able to turn this new reality into a remarkable competitive advantage.

The linear, throwaway economy of today-in which we extract resources at one end, create products, and throw them away at the other-is rapidly coming to an end. A new economy is being born, one that takes this line and turns it into a circle. In every industry, creative minds are learning how to make money from reducing rather than expanding.

Overfished Ocean Strategy offers five essential principles for innovating in this new reality. Zhexembayeva explains how businesses are finding new opportunities in what were once considered useless by-products. Business leaders and entrepreneurs are discovering resource-conserving efficiencies up and down their value chain and transferring their expertise from physical products to services. A business owner herself, Zhexembayeva fills the book with examples of companies that are already successfully navigating the overfished ocean, from established corporations such as BMW, Microsoft, and Puma to newcomers such as Lush, FLOOW2, and Sourcemap.

Nadya Zhexembayeva is the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor of Sustainable Development at IEDC-Bled School of Management in Slovenia and a business owner active in real estate, investment, and consulting. Her recent clients include the Coca-Cola Company, ENRC PLC, Erste Bank, Henkel, Knauf Insulation, and Vienna Insurance Group. She also serves as vice president of Challenge:Future, a global youth think-DO-tank. She earned her doctorate in organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.

Publication date: June 2014, $27.95, hardcover, 240 pages, 6â…›" x 9 ¼" ISBN 978-1-60994-964-8