Win-Win or Nothing!

you don't have to blow out the other fellow's light to let your own shine.

“It is Saturday, June the 6th” . That was the enthusiastic response from Alexa after I asked it what today’s date was. Of course, I have stopped tracking dates as a result of my joblessness. Every day now looks the same, the sun rises and then it sets.

Today is also the day, I completed the book “Co-opetition” written by Adam and Barry; two professors from Harvard Business School and Yale School of Management respectively. My strategy professor from business school recommended this book. To be completely honest, I suck at business strategy, firstly because I have little or no experience in it , secondly I didn’t pay attention in class because i was on a recruiting journey for my summer internship that spring(kids stay in school).

So, I promised myself to not just read but to study this book to compensate.

Co-opetition challenged my perception of the incentives in running a business. Prior to now, I viewed the game as simply doing every and anything to optimize profits so that you are the winner among your competitors. I wrongly defined a business strategy as a way of engineering a win-lose situation for yourself vs your competitors. The book, however, laid the foundational thought that win-win scenario is possible, and should be prioritized.

I love that the book is structured in two parts. Part 1, introduced the game of business like you would explain chess to a novice. It introduced the basic concepts; the rules, perceptions, scope and how they fit together. It simply explained how businesses can be complementors if they make a market together, and simultaneously competitors if they divide up the market. Part 2 centered around the PARTS of a strategy. PARTS is an acronym for players, added values, rules, tactics and scopes. Each chapter focuses on how you can play around with the PARTS of a business to change the outcomes of a business. The authors used business cases to make their points. Even though there were mostly old business cases, I think they were enough for me to get the gist. One of those cases is how Coke and Pepsi paid a new player(Holland) to stay in the Aspartame market that was previously dominated by NutraSweet - obviously, this allowed them to negotiate lower prices from NutraSweet.

As with any reasonable book, it ended with the right way to think about business strategy by asking the right PARTS questions. Overall, I feel better about capitalism :)