The Blue Ocean Strategy and Human Resources’ Strategic Management: WESC as a Case Study

While scholarly writings highlighted the embeddedness of corruptive practices within public institutions across developing countries and the need of adopting the private sector’s personnel management techniques, they did not specify how these managerial principals would be implemented. In this aim, this study borrows the concept of blue ocean strategy in emphasis on the innovative nature of human resources’ strategic planning within public and non-profit organizations in developing countries. It examines how WESC, an Egyptian non-profit organization, adopted human resources’ strategic planning as a blue ocean strategy toward the integration of new perspectives and opportunities in its management. The idea of blue ocean strategy is to discover new domains and/or renovate the existing ones so that public and non-profit organizations boost their productivity. This approach would be possibly implemented in the public sector to improve the quality of provided services and increase citizens’ satisfaction. Based on WESC analysis, this paper sheds light on how the blue ocean strategy was incorporated and would, hence, be an insightful perspective for administrative development in developing countries. By conducting seven open-ended and semi-structured interviews with its working staff and manager, this study unravels the blue ocean strategy’s rationale in light of WESC’s innovative and better changes in its human resources’ functions. By implementing human resources’ strategic planning, WESC, instead of perceiving the human resources’ department as a liability in its administrative structure, became convinced that the personnel management would be more efficiently and effectively carried out by more specialized employees in the human resources’ functions than line managers.