Ron Adner. Building strategies for success in an interdependent world.

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Resources

Winning the Right Game—Frameworks & Discussion Questions Download
Main Cases
Kodak
Tools
Value Architecture
Value Inversion
  1. Looking forward five years, what is the balance between inside vs outside the box threats and opportunities in your environment?
  2. What are the elements of your value architecture? How is each one being impacted by the changes in your environment? What does this reveal about the path of ecosystem disruption?
  3. Consider your partners. Where do they lie on the three complementor trajectories (Fig 1.9)? Where are you exposed to the threat of value inversion? Where do you have an opportunity to drive it?

Figure 1.9: The three possible relationships between the effectiveness of complementors and a focal firm’s own outcomes (examples are for a focal firm focused on profiting from digital printing consumables). Page 27

Source: Ron Adner, 2021. Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World.
MIT Press, Boston.

Main Cases
Wayfair vs. Amazon
TomTom, Garmin vs. Google
Spotify vs. Apple
Tools
The 3 Principles of Ecosystem Defense
  1. Consider the two or three biggest threats you are facing. What part of your value architecture are most under pressure?
  2. What does this mean for the need – or opportunity – to modify your elements and your value architecture? Where should you accept commoditization? What merits defending, enhancing, or redefining with new elements?
  3. What must change in your approach to partners as you modify your architecture in this way?

Figure 2.3: Wayfair’s enhanced value architecture, with addition of the Deliberation element and new links (marked in bold). Page 46

Source: Ron Adner, 2021. Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World.
MIT Press, Boston.

Main Cases
Amazon Alexa
Oprah Winfrey
ASSA ABLOY
Tools
MVE
Staged Expansion
Ecosystem Carryover
  1. To what extent are you focused on responding to competition vs. driving competition vs. changing the basis of competition? Is this the right balance?
  2. Consider you growth initiative. What is your plan for aligning your partners as you construct your ecosystem (MVE, Staged Expansion)?
  3. How are you approaching ecosystem carryover? How will you align internal partners to allow for the necessary commitment?

Figure 3.1: Ecosystem construction chart for Amazon Alexa. Page 80

Source: Ron Adner, 2021. Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World.
MIT Press, Boston.

Main Cases
Tesla and Autonomous Vehicles
Wolters Kluer
23andMe
Zebra Technologies
Tools
Trajectory Plot
Timing Framework
  1. How are you incorporating the impact of extension opportunities and emergence challenges into your timing expectations? What are the top two or three assumptions you are making? What is your strategy for validating them?
  2. What are the indicators that you want to track for planning the transitions across the quadrants in Table 4.1. Where in your organization is there greatest potential for shaping this progress?
  3. How are you linking your logic for Seize, Wait, Shape or Shift’ to a perspective on time compression diseconomies and the half-life of relevance? What are the sources of divergence within your team, and how will you sort through them?

Figure 4.4: Emergence challenges holding back the new value proposition interact with extension opportunities for the old value proposition to dramatically delay the time of disruption and the performance level required for disruption from point A to point D. Page 117

Source: Ron Adner, 2021. Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World.
MIT Press, Boston.

Main Cases
Apple and Mobile Payments
Electronic Books
GE Predix
Electronic Health Records
Microsoft vs. IBM
Tools
Leadership Litmus Test
Hierarchy of Winners
  1. Articulate the boundary of your current ecosystem. Where is there greatest disagreement on boundaries within your team? What does this mean for your organizational susceptibility to the ego-system trap?
  2. Consider your ecosystem initiative, and your responses to the litmus test questions. Who are your most supportive partners and followers? What does this mean for your MVE?
  3. Looking more broadly, how are you strategizing your role? What is your best argument for a leadership role? What is your best argument for smart followership? What is your process for weighing the two options?

Figure 5.2: The hierarchy of ecosystem winners and losers does not divide into leaders and followers. Page 150

Source: Ron Adner, 2021. Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World.
MIT Press, Boston.

Main Cases
Microsoft Azure
Tools
Ecosystem Cycle
  1. Where in the ecosystem cycle are your most important opportunities? What steps are you taking to developing and matching leaders to contexts?
  2. How are you approaching the tradeoffs between execution and alignment required for success at your level in the organization? One level above? One level below? What is your process for aligning these levels?
  3. What shifts are required in the internal ecosystem to support your initiative? How can you reduce the risk of successful but stranded pilots?

Figure 6.1: The ecosystem cycle of emergence and maturity and the leadership challenges associated with each phase of the cycle.

Source: Ron Adner, 2021. Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World.
MIT Press, Boston.

Main Cases
Tools
  1. What parts of your strategy do you think are least understood within your organization? How does this vary within the hierarchy (up, down, across)? Why do you think this is?
  2. What parts of your strategy are most/least supported by your approach to budgeting? If you could change two things, what would they be?
  3. How can you deploy the language and concepts presented in Winning the Right Game to increase strategic clarity AND strategic comprehension within your organization?

Winning the Right Game Overview

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