Co-Opetition - Adam M. Brandenburger [1]
—F. William Barnett, Director, McKinsey & Co.
“U.S. research and development—about $175 billion annually—faces stern imperatives of both competition and cooperation. The fresh ideas in Co-opetition, based on game theory, may help to renew the contract of science with society. This lively volume should be ‘must reading’ for R&D executives everywhere.”
—Rodney Nichols, President and CEO, New York Academy of Sciences
“A very useful book, persuasively argued and written with astonishing clarity.”
—Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People
“Co-opetition is the perfect approach for the health-care industry to avoid the destruction of much that is essential to the continuing health of the American people. It should be required reading by managers of health-care providers and health insurance or HMO managers.”
—John R. Gunn, EVP, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
“Brandenburger and Nalebuff have produced an exciting new approach to business strategy. Informed by modern game theory but not mechanically applying it, they have shown that the range of possible strategies is much broader than usually contemplated. Their exposition is light and yet deep and wide-ranging and richly exemplified with examples from business reality.”
—Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Prize Laureate (Economics)
“I was negotiating a big sale. The buyer wanted me to throw in my advance copy of Co-opetition as a sweetener. I said, ‘No. There are some things that aren’t negotiable.’ ”
—Herb Cohen, author of You Can Negotiate Anything
to Barbara
AMB
to Rachel, Zoë, and the loving memory of Benjamin
BJN
A CURRENCY PAPERBACK
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036
CURRENCY and DOUBLEDAY are trademarks of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.
Co-opetition was originally published
in hardcover by Currency Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.,
in 1996.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brandenburger, Adam.
Co-opetition / Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff.
p. cm.
“A revolutionary mindset that combines competition
and cooperation … The Game Theory strategy
that’s changing the game of business.”
1. Strategic planning. 2. Competition. 3. Cooperation. 4. Game theory. I. Nalebuff, Barry,
1958– . II. Title.
HD30.28.B696 1996
658.4—dc20 96-4900
eISBN: 978-0-307-79054-5
Copyright © 1996 by Adam M. Brandenburger
and Barry J. Nalebuff
Foreword copyright © 1997 by Adam M. Brandenburger
and Barry J. Nalebuff
All Rights Reserved
v3.1_r1
Foreword to the Paperback Edition
There’s nothing so practical as a good theory. A good theory confirms the conventional wisdom that “less is more.” A good theory does less because it doesn’t give answers. At the same time, it does a lot more because it helps people organize what they know and uncover what they don’t know. A good theory gives people the tools to discover what is best for them. That was our goal in writing Co-opetition.
Co-opetition offers a theory of value. It’s a book about creating value and capturing value. There’s a fundamental duality here: whereas creating value is an inherently cooperative process, capturing value is inherently competitive. To create value, people can’t act in isolation. They have to recognize their interdependence. To create value, a business must align itself with customers, suppliers, employees, and many others. That’s the way to develop new markets and expand existing ones.
But along with creating a pie, there’s the issue of dividing it up. This is competition. Just as businesses compete with one another for market share, customers and suppliers also are looking out for their slice of the pie.
Creating value that you