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Winning the Right Game
by Ron Adner
Published: 2021
Recommended by Books of the Channel
Categories: partnerships
Why should you read it?
This book explains why customer insight and strong execution are no longer sufficient on their own. As delivering value has become more dependent on collaboration, aligning partners has moved to center stage. In ecosystems, the challenge is no longer just execution within a company, but aligning partners whose view of roles and responsibilities may differ. For partnership professionals, this directly reflects the reality of working across multiple actors to deliver a shared value proposition. The book provides a clear way to understand how partner alignment, structure, and collaboration impact success when competition extends beyond traditional industry boundaries.
What is the book about?
Winning the Right Game focuses on how competition is shifting from well-defined industries to broader ecosystems that deliver expansive value propositions. It introduces the concept of ecosystem disruption, where new value propositions impact competition across industries, erasing boundaries and overturning structure. The book presents a new approach to strategy based on understanding how value is created through multiple actors. It introduces key concepts such as value proposition, ecosystem, and value architecture to explain how partners interact to deliver value to the end consumer. At its core, the book is about how to compete, collaborate, and coexist when traditional boundaries no longer apply.
Best takeaway
A central idea from the book is that organizations can succeed in execution and still fail if they are playing the wrong game. The case of Kodak shows that the company successfully managed the transition to digital printing and became a leader in that space, yet still lost relevance because the value of printing declined as digital viewing and sharing replaced it. This is explained through ecosystem disruption, where changes in one part of the system affect value creation in another, and through value inversion, where improvements in one area can undermine value in another. The implication is that focusing only on improving performance within a defined space is not enough, and that understanding how value is created across the broader ecosystem is essential.
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