Co-Opetition - Adam M. Brandenburger [117]
We’ve now looked at four levers of strategy: Players, Added values, Rules, and, in this chapter, Tactics. Is that it? Is PART the whole of strategy?
In principle, it is. At a fundamental level, there is only one game. Everyone interacts with everyone else, directly or indirectly, to pursue their various ends. Everything is ultimately connected to everything else. The game that includes all these interconnections might be enormous, but, in theory, that’s the game. And the cast of players, added values, rules, and perceptions together would completely describe this—somewhat mythical—giant game. If it were possible to handle all the complexities of one gigantic game, then PART would be a complete set of strategic levers.
The practical reality, of course, is different. The mind divides things in order to conquer them. People draw boundaries, make compartments, add mental partitions. And they know that everyone else does, too. Everyone behaves as though there are many games, operating more or less independently.
This provides one further lever for changing games, a lever ultimately as important as each we’ve discussed so far: you can change the game’s boundaries, alter its scope. This is the subject of our next chapter.
8. Scope
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.
—John Donne, Devotions
No game is an island. Even so, people draw boundaries and divide the world up into many separate games. It’s easy to fall into the trap of analyzing these separate games in isolation—imagining that there’s no larger game. The problem is that mental boundaries aren’t real boundaries—there are no real boundaries. Every game is linked to other games: a game in one place affects games elsewhere, and a game today influences games tomorrow. Even the mere anticipation of tomorrow’s game influences today’s.
Understanding, playing off, and changing the links between games is our fifth, and final, lever of strategy. The first step is to recognize the links between games. The links are there. Even if you don’t see them, you can still trip over them, as we saw back in the Game Theory chapter when we looked at the story of Epson’s entry into the laser printer market. Once you’ve seen the links, you can use them to your benefit. The links aren’t ironclad: you can create new links between games or sever existing ones. And by doing so, you can change the scope of the game.
1. Links between Games
What types of links can exist between games? Happily, we already know the answer to this question. Here’s why. We’ve said that there’s really only one “big” game—one game extending across space, over time, down generations. Any two games, even if conceived of as games in their own right, are really only components of the big game. By definition, this mythical big game is a game without boundaries, without a defined scope, if you like. So, PART—Players, Added values, Rules, and Tactics—describes all the elements of the mythical big game.
Since PART describes the whole, it must, in particular, describe how the pieces of the whole fit together. That is, it must describe the links between any two games, since any two games are no more than components of the big game. PART, then, is the way to classify the links between games.
Start with Players. Anytime there’s a player in your game who’s also a player in another game, the two games are potentially linked.1 The player in common could be anyone in your Value Net—any of your customers, suppliers, competitors, or complementors. It could also be you, of course. The existence of a common player determines only the possibility of a link between two games. To determine whether the two games are linked—and if so, how—you have to go through the rest of PART.
Links through Added values can arise whenever your customers