MIT Press Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

Ron Adner describes the concepts, tools and frameworks necessary to confront the threat of ecosystem disruption and develops strategies that will let incumbents play ecosystem offense.This is another effectively written book by Ron who previously wrote The Wide Lens which was another remarkable book for professionals and students are always thrive in transformation and adaptation.

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!

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.

Adner ist sicherlich ein strategischer Vordenker. Seine Konzeptionen rund um das "Ecosystem" sind brilliant. Auch seine Behandlung des Kodak-Cases. Danach fand ich es etwas schwerer zu lesen und vor allem in ein einfach zu vermittelndes konzeptionelles Programm zu bringen. Vielleicht muss ich nochmal ran. Sicher ein Buch, das man lesen sollte.

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!

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.