This book is about the challenges that emerge for organizations from an ever faster changing world. While useful at their time, several management tools, including classic strategic planning processes, will no longer suffice to address these challenges in a timely and comprehensive fashion. While individual management tools are still valid to solve specific problems, they need to be employed based on a clear understanding of what the greater challenge is and how they need to be combined and prioritized with other approaches. In order to do so, companies can apply the clarity of thinking from the military with regard to which leadership level is responsible for what and how these levels need to interact in order to produce a single aligned response to an outside opportunity or threat. Finally, the tool of business wargaming, while known for some time, proves to be an ideal approach to quickly and effectively bring all leadership levels together, align them around a common objective and lay the groundwork for effective implementation of targeted responses that will keep the organization competitive and in the game for the long run. The book offers a comprehensive introduction to business wargaming, including a historical account, a classification of different types of games and a number of specific real-world examples. This book is targeted at practicing managers dealing with the aforementioned challenges, as well as for students of business and strategy at every level.

How uncertainty in games -- from Super Mario Bros. to Rock/Paper/Scissors -- engages players and shapes play experiences.

How uncertainty in games—from Super Mario Bros. to Rock/Paper/Scissors—engages players and shapes play experiences. In life, uncertainty surrounds us. Things that we thought were good for us turn out to be bad for us (and vice versa); people we thought we knew well behave in mysterious ways; the stock market takes a nosedive. Thanks to an inexplicable optimism, most of the time we are fairly cheerful about it all. But we do devote much effort to managing and ameliorating uncertainty. Is it any wonder, then, asks Greg Costikyan, that we have taken this aspect of our lives and transformed it culturally, making a series of elaborate constructs that subject us to uncertainty but in a fictive and nonthreatening way? That is: we create games. In this concise and entertaining book, Costikyan, an award-winning game designer, argues that games require uncertainty to hold our interest, and that the struggle to master uncertainty is central to their appeal. Game designers, he suggests, can harness the idea of uncertainty to guide their work. Costikyan explores the many sources of uncertainty in many sorts of games—from Super Mario Bros. and Dungeons & Dragons to Rock/Paper/Scissors, from Monopoly to CityVille, from FPS Deathmatch play to Chess. He describes types of uncertainty, including performative uncertainty, analytic complexity, and narrative anticipation. And he suggests ways that game designers who want to craft novel game experiences can use an understanding of game uncertainty in its many forms to improve their designs.

How to succeed in an era of ecosystem-based disruption: strategies and tools for offense, defense, timing, and leadership in a changing competitive landscape. The basis of competition is changing. Are you prepared? Rivalry is shifting from well-defined industries to broader ecosystems: automobiles to mobility platforms; banking to fintech; television broadcasting to video streaming. Your competitors are coming from new directions and pursuing different goals from those of your familiar rivals. In this world, succeeding with the old rules can mean losing the new game. Winning the Right Game introduces the concepts, tools, and frameworks necessary to confront the threat of ecosystem disruption and to develop the strategies that will let your organization play ecosystem offense. To succeed in this world, you need to change your perspective on competition, growth, and leadership. In this book, strategy expert Ron Adner offers a new way of thinking, illustrating breakthrough ideas with compelling cases. How did a strategy of ecosystem defense save Wayfair and Spotify from being crushed by giants Amazon and Apple? How did Oprah Winfrey redraw industry boundaries to transition from television host to multimedia mogul? How did a shift to an alignment mindset enable Microsoft's cloud-based revival? Each was rooted in a new approach to competitors, partners, and timing that you can apply to your own organization. For today's leaders the difference between success and failure is no longer simply winning, but rather being sure that you are winning the right game.

Why approach uncertainty as a game?Facing the unknown like a creative act allows us to defy inertia, move from a position of victimization, and take the lead in a new destiny. The playful sense of our approach transforms frustration into a heroic act of personal growth. This book proposes a game of possibilities that allow the new to be possible in your life. It is a small book. However, it has been designed so that you will never stop reading it. You will complete it many times. It is not many pages, but you will permanently return to its pages to look for phrases, inspiration, resources, support. Each time you return, you will have the renewing experience of a new cycle. The book leads you to explore life as a board of challenges, renew the inner dialogue that locks you into mandates and narrow affirmations to recreate your moves and grow amid uncertainty.Marcelo Manucci is an international academic and consultant who has devoted nearly 20 years to researching uncertainty from different disciplines. He is a psychologist with Ph.D. in communication with postgraduate studies in Neurosciences. He works in universities in America and Europe, has written eight books in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.www.marcelomanucci.com

Industry consolidation, mergers, changes to business models, the emergence of new threats all require managers to understand highly complex situations, assess risk and opportunity and make informed decisions. How can senior managers do this effectively when so often they are wrestling with brand new scenarios? One of the emerging solutions is business wargaming. Daniel F. Oriesek and Jan Oliver Schwarz provide the first comprehensive look at wargaming as a business tool in a book that explores the anatomy and success factors of a typical wargame. The authors explain how and when wargaming can be used to test strategies, plan and prepare for crises, manage change or increase your organization's ability to anticipate and adapt for the future. Creating imaginative and credible scenarios, and testing them against smart opponents who are eager to find holes and counter your strategy, allows you to learn about a plan or a new venture in the security of the conference room rather than learning the hard way when you go live. Business wargames are sophisticated but they are also very demanding in terms of time and resources. Business Wargaming: Securing Corporate Value will enable you to assess the potential value of the technique for your own organization, to understand what you will be committing to and develop an informed business case and brief for working with the organization that will facilitate the game.

This book examines competitive balance and outcome uncertainty from multiple perspectives. Chapters address the topic in different sports in a range of countries, to help to understand its significance. It provides readers with important new insights into previously unexplored dimensions as well as a rich context for better understanding why fans, teams, and leagues value competitive balance. The book challenges readers to think about the topic in a broad and rigorous way, and in some cases to question widely held beliefs about how outcome uncertainty motivates competitive balance, and how sports fans actually view competitive balance.