Co-Opetition - Adam M. Brandenburger [36]
Part II
The PARTS of Strategy
How to Change the Game
Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point however, is to change it.
—Karl Marx
We don’t mind being a little revolutionary in thinking that success comes from playing the right game. The biggest opportunities—and the biggest profits—don’t come from playing the game differently. They come from changing the game itself. If you’re playing the wrong game, you need to change it. Even if it’s a good game, think about creating a better one. Changing the game is the essence of business strategy.
Marx had a point. The action comes from changing the game.
When people talk about changing the game, they often say: “You have to change the rules.” That’s certainly one way to change the game. But it’s only one of several.
In fact, every element of the game is also a lever for changing it. To change a game, you need to change one or more of its elements. This means that each of the five elements—Players, Added values, Rules, Tactics, and Scope—gives you a way to transform an existing game into an entirely new one. Change one of the PARTS, and you change the whole.
To help you gain a deeper understanding of how to change the game, we devote a chapter to each of the five ways of doing so. We’ll look first at changing the cast of players: how to do it and the consequences of doing it. Then, in the following four chapters, we’ll go on to examine what’s involved in changing the other four elements of a game. As you master each strategic lever, you’ll become better equipped to change the game.
As long as you search for new strategies in a hit-or-miss fashion, you may well miss the best opportunities for your business. PARTS leaves nothing out. Go through all of PARTS in a deliberate way, and you can be confident of spotting all the possibilities. The strategies PARTS suggests may not always be new, although frequently they are. What’s new is being able to generate strategies systematically.
PARTS does more than exhort you to “think your way out of the box.” It provides the tools for finding your way out of the box.
4. Players
Cui bono?
Who stands to gain?
—Cicero
Do you want to be a player? It’s the obvious question to ask yourself when you consider entering a game. But the answer is rarely obvious. It’s easy to misjudge what it would really be like to be in the game.
The reason is that anytime you enter a game, you change it. You don’t have any choice in the matter. It’s a new game because you’ve joined the cast of players. People often miss this effect. They fail to think through how their coming into a game will change it. They think that what they see is what they’re going to get.
Not so. The game after you’ve entered it isn’t the same as the one you first saw. In physics, this effect is known as the Heisenberg principle—you can’t interact with a system without changing it. There’s a Heisenberg principle in business, too: it’s the way you change a game by joining it. That’s where we begin this chapter.
To show how this works in practice, we’ll examine three different stories of becoming a player. Two of the newcomers fared poorly, one made a lot of money. That was the one who understood how its entry would change the game. We’ll draw out the general lessons from these stories. With these lessons in mind, you’ll know how to ensure that the decision to become a player is a profitable one.
1. Becoming a Player
Generally, if you want to play, you have to pay. The cost of becoming a player can be cheap when, for example, it means quoting a price over the phone. It’s more expensive if you have to pitch an advertising or marketing campaign. It’s more expensive