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p.13 War games in business are hot.
p.13-14 Marketing managers, brand teams, and product and project leaders should be able to run quick, cheap, and effective
war games to:
- Assess and anticipate changes in their markets.
- Pressure-test global and regional strategies.
- Develop and test plans to go after existing competitors or defend against rising threats.
- "Insulate" new launches.
- Get a buy-in, identify gaps in market knowledge, and create a defensible business case.
p.16-17 what is the unique essence of war gaming? ...War gaming is nothing more than role-playing in order
to understand a third party, with the goal of answering: What will the opponent do? What then is my best option?
p.17
The chance of success for any and every competitive strategy depends to a large degree on the reactions of third
parties such as competitors, but, because most of us do not have direct knowledge of these intended reactions,
role-playing allows us to predict these reactions without such knowledge.
p.18-19 managers... should consider their plans as bets that come
with risk, a risk originating from competitive dynamics in their markets, and study those risks carefully to minimize
them. War gaming will not guarantee their success - nothing will - but it will increase the odds in their favor.
p.19-20 You want an inexpensive, quick, simple, and realistic war gaming methodology, a methodology you can
apply to decisions all over the company.
p.22 war games are not about wars... There are several much more appropriate terms... my favorite: "Iterations
of Rivals' Strategies" ... it is not about war and it is not about fantasy games... Getting to think like the character
(in this case, the competitor they role-play) allows the manager to make accurate predictions about competitors' real moves.
p.24 In theory, confronting reality is what business is all about.
p.25 The best strategies, the most rigorous research, the clearest of operating plans - all are undermined
because the key people behind them have missed the reality of the situation for one reason or another.
p.25 Management allows for the possibility of plans to go wrong, and is willing to make changes to strategy
to improve its odds under competitive pressure.
p.27 War gaming does not replace strategic planning. It is a technique to be used with traditional
planning processes. When it comes to evaluating strategies in light of likely reactions from opponents, war gaming
is the most focused on the external perspectives and therefore effective in getting one away from rehashing internal beliefs.
p.39 The art of war gaming is an old art.
p.40 Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" of Prussia, was famous as well as notorious for his insistence
on basing every political, diplomatic, and military move on a profound understanding of underlying dynamics and likely
responses.
p.51 You don't need 100-percent accuracy to improve your plan's odds of success. All you need is a
realistic and pragmatic assessment of competitors' most likely responses.
p.54-55 you should ask questions such as these: What is changing in the market? Which forces are growing
in strength (and importance)? Which competitors seem to position themselves to capitalize on the opportunities brought
about by the shifting balance? Which competitors seem oblivious to those shifts? ...Is my plan robust enough to survive those
shifts? Does it take advantage of them?
p.55, 57 Through the years, management gurus and academics proposed various frameworks to predicting
competitor's strategies... but none has come even close to the predictive power of Michael Porter's pioneering Four Corners
Model... Porter called for understanding what motivates the competition... by examining drivers of corporate behavior
and the mind set of company's decision makers
p.66, 67 Strategic thinking requires iterations: You do one thing, the opponent does
another, you respond, it responds, and so on... Remember the following rule of thumb: Predicting competitors' moves is similar
to predicting hurricanes.
p.69 Porter talks about hot buttons in the sense of what will provoke the competitors' strongest and most
effective retaliation.
p.86-87 If your management is currently in love with game theory (or some other mathematical
modeling technique du jour) you may be intimidated into using it in war-gaming decisions. It is not an effective
tool for you. (Feel free to copy and send this appendix anonymously to the executive who seems to be the
present advocate of the technique, or similar mathematical approximations of real competitors' behaviors.) ...game
theory suffers from lack of realism in approximating (and predicting) competitors' behavior.
p.96 Landscape games are so named because their objective is to examine the "competitive landscape." These
games are designed to enable management to place the company in the most advantageous position given anticipated future
market conditions.
p.97 Underlying the plan is a belief that competitive response is
containable.
p.97 the problem is that the market is never at its hypothetical equilibrium, and "stable states" are misleading.
p.98 Landscape games are aimed at unmasking the underlying, ambiguous changes
in a market early on. In the process, Landscape games unmask competitors' adjustments, or lack thereof, to the emerging
disequilibrium risks and opportunities... Landscape games are best played when management wants to stay ahead of
the changing market... Landscapes games are sometimes known as early warning games, because companies who play them are proactively
looking at weak signals and trying to interpret ambiguous changes in the market.
p.99 So why run a landscape game? Because management wanted to make sure it was not missing out on strategic
risks and opportunities in the environment.
p.102 it's easy to suggest that people "think outside the box" about competitors' responses, but
most battles for market share take place within the box, and the art of war gaming to a large extent is defining successfully
what this box is for a competitor... Hannibal won the battle against the much-larger Roman army because
he predicted their most likely move, not because he planned against everything that could go wrong!
p.105 Test # 2 of any war game you decide to run is that the game must empower you to walk away
from a bad plan.
Don't run a war game when its outcome can no longer change anything.
p.184 An effective war game produces a list of improvements for the existing plan, or a list of
options for a new plan. [Great idea for playing a strategic board game]
p.186 A war game uncovers your organization's intelligence capability - or lack thereof. You can ignore
it, or you can capitalize on the findings.
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