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Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World (Management on the Cutting Edge) Kindle Edition

by Ron Adner (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 103 ratings
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How to succeed in an era of ecosystem-based disruption: strategies and tools for offense, defense, timing, and leadership in a changing competitive landscape.

The basis of competition is changing. Are you prepared? Rivalry is shifting from well-defined industries to broader ecosystems: automobiles to mobility platforms; banking to fintech; television broadcasting to video streaming. Your competitors are coming from new directions and pursuing different goals from those of your familiar rivals. In this world, succeeding with the old rules can mean losing the new game. Winning the Right Game introduces the concepts, tools, and frameworks necessary to confront the threat of ecosystem disruption and to develop the strategies that will let your organization play ecosystem offense.

To succeed in this world, you need to change your perspective on competition, growth, and leadership. In this book, strategy expert Ron Adner offers a new way of thinking, illustrating breakthrough ideas with compelling cases. How did a strategy of ecosystem defense save Wayfair and Spotify from being crushed by giants Amazon and Apple? How did Oprah Winfrey redraw industry boundaries to transition from television host to multimedia mogul? How did a shift to an alignment mindset enable Microsoft's cloud-based revival? Each was rooted in a new approach to competitors, partners, and timing that you can apply to your own organization. For today's leaders the difference between success and failure is no longer simply winning, but rather being sure that you are winning the right game.
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From the Publisher

"It's not enough to win a game, you have to win the right game"

Quote from Jim Collins

quote from Rebecca Henderson

quote from Que Dallara, Honeywell

Winning the Right Game and the Wide Lens

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ron Adner teaches with clarity and conviction that, in a world beset by roiling waves of turbulent disruption, the next big winners will be those who craft a deeply resilient strategic architecture. While many strategists focus on the firm and its industry, Adner urgently pushes us to zoom out, to see—and ultimately to harness—the larger map of connections and interdependencies in an entire ecosystem. Rigorous and relevant, thoughtful and practical, Adner is proving himself to be one of our most important strategic thinkers for the twenty-first century.”
—Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall, coauthor of Built to Last and Great by Choice

“Winning the Right Game is a landmark contribution to the strategy literature. Any leader who does not understand their value architecture risks being blindsided by ecosystem disruption. Essential reading for anyone involved in setting strategy—or who wants to be.”
—Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty University Professor, Harvard University; author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

“Once again, Ron Adner has written a book that changes how you think about value creation and competitive outlook. This book is a powerful tool for executives leading transformations under uncertainty. I found myself reading it again and again for inspiration.”
—Que Dallara, President & CEO, Honeywell Connected Enterprise


“In times of radical change, the ability to reinvent organizations from a position of strength is key to staying relevant. Winning the Right Game offers a brilliant strategic framework to lead the transformation of entire value chains through an ecosystem approach.”
—Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman, Siemens and A. P. Moller Maersk

“After living through a major industry transformation at Kodak, I know that the challenges of disruption cannot be met by just doing what you’ve historically done well even better. Ron Adner’s book provides critical insight into how to determine what the emerging competitive environment will likely hold and how to prosper in it.”
—Steve Sasson, Kodak (retired), inventor of the digital camera

About the Author

Ron Adner, the author of The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See that Others Miss, is an award-winning professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is a speaker and advisor to companies around the world and founder of the Strategy Insight Group.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08MQ4DCYN
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press (October 5, 2021)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 5, 2021
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 5609 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 270 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0262546000
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 103 ratings

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Ron Adner

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
103 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Adil Jafry
5.0 out of 5 stars Critical insights for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists disrupting a dynamic ecosystem
Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2021
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'Winning the Right Game' has been a delight to read and use in my daily discourse as I consider early stage investments in clean tech and sustainability startups.

In addition to defining well the differences between a classic and an ecosystem disruption, the book's main focus is to enable innovators (both startups and established companies) build and sustain value-accretive ecosystems.

I found the case studies very useful, since they provide important insights into how innovative companies could win against their traditional (or emerging) competition, and yet potentially lose massively to the shifts in customer preferences and/or market dynamics.

Another important message that the book conveys is that the boundaries between allies and competitors have continued to blur, and frequently it is difficult to tell how shifts in customer preferences (or market dynamics) could pit allies against each other in the future, and/or require partnerships between previous competitors.

'Winning the Right Game' picks up exactly where 'The Wide Lens' (Ron Adner's prior book) stops - providing tools, models, and ways of thinking strategically in highly uncertain and dynamic settings, where a superior product or strategy aren't sufficient to win, and where concentrating resources in developing competence and capabilities requires anticipating how the partner ecosystem will evolve under various uncertain future outcomes.

The book is a seminal resource for strategic thinking, and can fundamentally high-grade an entrepreneur's approach, enabling them to think holistically about their company and industry - and each participant's role, rewards, and risks, within the ecosystem.

I believe the book is an equally useful resource for venture capitalists who frequently need to make calls between two very similar looking (and equally fast-growing) firms, but which may in the end have very different exit outcomes - entirely based on the founder's approach to defining their company's role and value (as a disruptor) in the ecosystem.
3 people found this helpful
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Harish
5.0 out of 5 stars A practical guide for every leader in the connected world
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2021
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After a fantastic first book, "The Wide Lens" that focused critically on how Co-adoption and Co-innovation risks can deride the best of intents and execution, Ron Adner follows it up with a book on ways to define the difference between a classic and an ecosystem disruption, why different mindsets and frameworks are required in maneuvering them and, most crucially in identifying (as the title rightly calls out), the right games to go after. In other words, building an ecosystem right in itself isn't good enough if it isn't sustainable (Kodak as the poster child of winning the wrong game and them going bankrupt immediately after).

As with the Wide Lens, this book is filled with pertinent examples. providing a different context on firms we interact with such as Wayfair and Garmin; how they survived an ecosystem onslaught and crucially also thrived phenomenally well.

The path the book builds with defining the framework, applying it to firms that won (and lost) the ecosystem game by defining a clear north star and working their way towards it; identifying key trigger points where industries are ripe for an eco-system disruption was brilliant.

The best is saved for the last though, as the book dives deeper into a concept that was introduced in the Wide Lens - Leadership in an ecosystem disruption and the mindsets required to align partners at the onset and in the future.

As the world gets more connected, ecosystem disruptions will only occur more frequently, with every leader in every firm looking to expand their adjacencies and offer larger solutions. As the book rightly calls out, technology innovation is crucial but its introduction into a market is just as equally (if not more) critical. Every executive will do well to not only read this book but form a team that enables a conscious practice of the guidance that this book provides.
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Shahid Khan
5.0 out of 5 stars How to win & grow with Ecosystem play
Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2021
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Ron again brings the best use cases to real-life use cases that help understand the power of the ecosystem participation deployment partnership leading it or following it.

One of the most critical learnings from Ron's book is the leadership qualities needed to lead an ecosystem.

Leadership qualities are a profound identification of a successful path to lead in an ecosystem game.

The next critical aspect is hope for companies or enterprises that were not born digitally (i.e., more than 30 years old) with ecosystem blueprints.

One can learn many lessons from a 100-year-old mechanical lock company that successfully transformed creating an ecosystem. This company created a new ecosystem made up of many new players; it is a must-read.

Another critical aspect is the often misunderstood story of Kodak's digital journey. Ron elucidates the real story to learn some profound lessons and not repeat them by present-day companies.

In the end, I think this book is a must-read along with Ron's first book called the 'Wide Lens.'

In summary, incredible actionable ideas towards a growth-centric future for all companies.
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Brandon
5.0 out of 5 stars The new standard for strategic thinking
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2021
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This book is a must read for understanding how strategy has shifted from an industry mindset to an ecosystem mindset. It's become a critical component of my strategy playbook. The cases illustrate great examples of how you can win as an incumbent, a startup, and as someone in the cross-hairs of an industry giant. Every large corporation, startup and entrepreneur will be able to see themselves represented in the amazing stories presented in here.

It frames how to address key strategic questions for modern companies, like: How do you predict the timing of ecosystem disruption, and know when and how to respond to it? What do you do when your company is in the cross hairs of an industry giant? Or when the boundaries of industries are blurred, and former partners become rivals?

Incredibly insightful, full of great examples and highly recommend for everyone!
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Top reviews from other countries

FULTON STEPHEN
5.0 out of 5 stars "only the paranoid survive"
Reviewed in Germany on November 20, 2023
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Lots of thought provokers and written in a style without too much business school jargon. I especially liked the case studies, all of which I can relate to.
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B.Sudhakar Shenoy
5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic
Reviewed in India on December 4, 2021
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The Fortune 500 list, the world’s largest companies by revenue was first published in 1955. As on date, over 80 percent of these companies have either been dropped from this list or have become history, thanks to the forces of ‘Creative Destruction’ or Joseph Schumpeter’s gale. Humpties and Dumpties, far too many for all the king’s horses and men.

Business strategy as a major discipline in management literature emerged to guide business to survive and thrive in uncertain times. Scholars like Michael Porter (Competitive Strategy), Ted Levitt (Marketing Myopia), CK Prahalad (Core Competence), Clayton Christensen (Disruptive Innovation), Charles Fine (Clock Speed), Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy), Vijay Govindarajan (Three Box framework) and consulting firms like BCG (BCG Matrix) and McKinsey (No Ordinary Disruption) gave us path breaking concepts on how to succeed in the fiercely competitive and unforgiving marketplace.

In my opinion, all the above concepts are Necessary, but NOT Sufficient in today’s world, that has seen dramatic transformation, in all aspects of life, including globalization, digitization, convergence of technologies, environmental concerns, stakeholder capitalism and above all, the collapse of the static industry structure that was assumed to be given. Competition was earlier a game played within well-defined boundaries with PARTS (Players, Added Value, Rules, Tactics and Scope as articulated in the book Co-opetition by Brandenburger and Nalebuff). But what if you are playing the wrong game with no spectators and prizes to win? This book is about playing the right game and also playing it right.

Prof Ron Adner’s book is about the new paradigm of ecosystems, that is defined as a structure through which partners interact to deliver a value proposition to the end consumer. Compare this to the traditional supply chain of the automotive industry for example, where we are familiar with the dominant OEMs, Tier1, Tier 2 suppliers, perfectly and rigidly glued, driving efficient execution with incremental innovations.

The book starts with the example of Kodak, and to me this is the perfect Kodak moment that inspires the rest of the book. Kodak did not fail because it failed to embrace digital technologies, but despite it. From the traditional industry view, there are four clear steps in photography as it was known till then: Capture->Produce->View->Share. Cameras that did the ‘Capture’ part became digital. Kodak, managed to remain dominant in Produce and View, due to its deep expertise in conventional film and digital printing technologies. Incremental changes in each of the well defined four boxes as the author puts it, was no threat to Kodak. With the emergence of iPhones and touch screens, the boxes collapsed and merged into the handheld smartphone, aided by social networks like Facebook and Instagram. This was certainly not a ‘Kodak moment’ for Kodak. The rest of the book is unputdownable.

In today’s ecosystems, it starts with customer insights, a clear value proposition, that is delivered through a network of aligned value architecture, through tasks, capabilities and technologies by ecosystem partners.

In classic disruption, new technology replaces another technology within a single box in the series of well defined, yet mutually independent boxes of the supply chain. Ecosystem disruption in not substitution, but redefinition of value. The value created by a new box simply destroys the rest of the boxes, as in the case of smart phone vs Kodak. Hence, business strategy is not about winning in a box, but by creating and winning in the right box.

The term Value Inversion is the most important concept in management literature, introduced by this book. When a complementary product becomes too good, it becomes a substitute and undermines value created by the other partners. Value inversion in ‘Capture’ was the downfall of Kodak.

The book is spread into seven exciting chapters. Having defined the ecosystem concept, the remaining chapters build further on concepts like Ecosystem Defense, Offense, Timing, and lessons for leadership in crafting strategy. Gone are the days of a single company dominating within narrow industry boundaries. But the hubris and arrogance of large corporates are their biggest liabilities that blinds their leaders in seeing the new reality. (For example, there are many more Kodaks waiting to happen in the mobility industry).

The case studies (across varied) industries, frameworks and illustration are outstanding. Personally, I found Table 4.1 ‘A framework for analyzing the pace of ecosystem disruption’, as the shining gem on this beautiful jewel.

Ingenious, Insightful and inspiring, this book is undoubtedly a brilliant classic.

Thank you, Prof Adner. As an alumnus of Tuck School of Business, for me, this is one of the finest lessons that a student can hope for.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Genius delivered with clarity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 23, 2021
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Really great book that has been so useful for our team. We bought it for the entire exec team before our strategy session. Concepts are delivered in a very relatable and practical way, but the thinking is profound. It provided us with a structure to think through our next 3 years as a company, navigating huge changes abs disruptions that are on the horizon. Highly recommend!
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Rajesh Solanki
5.0 out of 5 stars Ecosystem!
Reviewed in India on November 26, 2022
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This book is the first I ever read on thinking of ecosystems and growing through partnerships . Superb read indeed.
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SIVAKUMAR NARAYANAN
5.0 out of 5 stars Super relevant and fresh thinking
Reviewed in Germany on January 9, 2022
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This is one of the consequential strategy books over the last two years. Super relevant because many businesses have to shift from product or services to eco system strategy. I especially liked the timing framework and the leadership mindset shift. Highly recommended!
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