Co-opetition summary

Navigating the business world and understanding all the different players involved can be confusing. To make it a bit easier for yourself, use game theory, an approach for developing effective strategy when your actions depend on those of other players.

First, you need to assess each player’s relative position by unpacking the PARTS. The acronym PARTS represents the five elements of the business game:

When a business player thinks about entering the market, they often forget one important point: whenever the number of players changes, so does the game itself.

Your decision to enter the game might not necessarily be a bad thing for the existing player, and could even be as valuable to them as it is to you. After all, if you become a competitor to one player, another will profit. The customer, for example, will have more options if you decide to enter the market.

Remember the A in PARTS? Right, it stands for Added value, which refers to whatever a player brings to the game upon entering. It’s important to keep in mind that this added value isn’t a constant, fixed factor – you can change it.

But first, why would you want to? Well, if you’re already adding value to the game, you can gain power by diminishing the added value of other players.

When we’re children, other people’s rules govern our behavior: we cross the street when the light is green, go to bed when we’re told and walk through our elementary school hallways in single file.

But in adulthood, we can make up some of the rules ourselves. And in the business world, this changes the game completely. Here, rules determine how you must treat your employees, the environment and your customers.

The human mind is a powerful thing. In the business world, each player’s perception of the game can actually change the reality of game itself!

Why? Well, our ideas about how things work motivate our behavior. So, if you want to change how players in the game interact, start by changing their perceptions.

If you want to, you can look at anything in life as a big game. But here’s the thing: each game is part of another, bigger game. The simple fact that every game is linked to every other game means that your behavior as a player can have a ripple effect.

After all, what you do today in the television industry might impact what happens tomorrow in the political sphere; just one action can link two completely separate games.