Winning the Right Game Quotes

“While the CEO sets the tone, it is team leaders who manage the details of action and interaction, with internal and external partners. Alignment mindset matters throughout the organization.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“And it is here—at the level of the individual—where we inevitably find that the critical ingredients for turning an openness to new trade-offs into effective alignment are humility and empathy. An alignment mindset depends on humility to accept the reality that others will not blindly follow; and it depends on empathy to understand what will enable and inspire the productive followership that is the bedrock of a sustainable ecosystem structure. This is the critical guide for building trust, and for determining which trade-offs make sense for which partner, and when.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“A successful execution-mindset CEO drives their firm to great heights within an initial ecosystem. A transformational CEO takes their firm across ecosystems to redefine value creation and competition through new architectures and configurations. Both types—the Ballmers and the Nadellas—have necessarily developed an execution mindset to have succeeded in the first ecosystem. It is the second type that become legends. The difference lies in the ability to rediscover the alignment mindset required to succeed in the next ecosystem.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“It takes an alignment mindset to establish an ecosystem. However, once it is aligned, the skillset and mindset of alignment become objectively less important. What matters at this point is execution within the boundaries of the ecosystem—the management challenge of getting the trains to run on time, and the opportunity to get the most out of the figurative train lines—extending new services, bolting on adjacent businesses, and doing all this at growing scale with growing efficiency while managing the established relationships within the ecosystem.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“It is clear that mindsets, like strategies, must change along the ecosystem cycle. Can the same person do it all? The challenge resides not only in the individual, but also in the organization’s staffing and re-skilling approach and what capabilities are being prioritized. As the ecosystem cycle progresses, we should expect breaks and discontinuities.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Nadella shows that broad-based ecosystem ambition can be sustained if it is tailored to the coalition: leading in the arenas where others are willing to follow; supporting the leadership of others where your own followership is more productive. The enlightened resolution to the ego-system trap is creating an alignment structure in which everyone can be the hero of their own journey.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Nadella has struck a powerful balance—aligning the Azure ecosystem, where Microsoft is clearly the leader, while allowing partners in the ecosystem to leverage their participation toward progress elsewhere. His goal is not to create the operating system for the intelligent car, for example, but to be the infrastructure that processes the information (at least for now). As Providence St. Joseph Health CEO Rod Hochman explained when announcing his choice to shift the data and applications of his fifty-one-hospital system to the Azure cloud, he chose Microsoft over Amazon, Apple, and Google because “[Microsoft isn’t] trying to be in the health-care business, but [is] trying to make it better.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Establishing leadership means guiding independent partners toward your chosen goal, while allowing them to maintain their sense that they remain the heroes of their own story. Creating such a context requires empathy: the capacity to understand and share in the feelings of others. At the personal level, empathy is about sharing emotions. At the strategic level, it is about sharing perspective.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“A CEO is royalty when at home, enjoying hierarchical deference within the internal ecosystem of their organization. But a CEO courting other CEOs to join a coalition is a monarch visiting a different kingdom. Within their own organization, a CEO who embraces a servant-leader approach motivates subordinates by the demonstration of care and humility. But this servant-leadership only counts when you have authority to sacrifice. A stranger has no such power in a foreign land. It should therefore come as no surprise that successful corporate leaders struggle to align nascent ecosystems, where their authority does not exist. The guiding rulebook here must shift from that of authority to that of diplomacy.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“we will examine the tensions between the execution mindset required to exercise leadership within a mature ecosystem and the alignment mindset required to establish leadership in an emerging ecosystem. Understanding how to manage the fit between these mindsets and your position in the ecosystem cycle matters regardless of whether your purpose is selecting leaders, working under leaders, or developing yourself as a leader.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“This is the followers’ version of the ego-system trap: acting as though the game is only played between themselves and the leader, rather than positioning broadly with regard to the other players in the ecosystem.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“And here is the crux: hospitals agreed to follow, and in return demanded financial compensation—they negotiated with the leader about their terms. This is a naive approach to followership. The IT firms, on the other hand, played a smarter game. They not only negotiated with the leader for the financial assistance that would help their sales; they also negotiated for the inclusion of meaningful use—an imposition not on the leader, but on the behavior of other followers. They shaped the long term-governance of the ecosystem when the rules were still malleable. Smart.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Smart followers will consider how they want to interact not just with the leader, but with other followers as well. This is where the smartest followers play their best moves—not in negotiating against the leader, but in shaping the rules for other followers.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“For established firms, the opportunity to anchor a new initiative with an internal customer can amplify the delusion of leadership. It is a double-edged sword that should be handled with care. On the plus side, an internal customer creates an opportunity to jump-start scale and show activity. The risks, however, are (a) that the internal customer is taken as an unbiased signal of market demand; (b) that the business generated by the internal customer is used as a source of revenue for the venture, rather than leveraged to attract and align early stage partners; and (c) that the artificially low barriers to serve and support the internal customer mask the need to realign the firm’s own internal ecosystem in ways that serve and support external partners and customers”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Successful platforms are constructed, not simply launched. The absence of a clear MVE and a staged approach to adding partners is a signal that alignment is being presumed rather than planned.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Reinforcing the importance of this opportunity, Immelt added: “The Industrial Internet is a win-win for GE and our customers. Our offerings will increase GE’s services margins and boost organic industrial growth, with the potential to drive as much as $20 billion in annual savings across our industries.” There is a word missing in these statements that marks the difference between a great value proposition and a successful ecosystem: partners. This absence is what separates a service business that relies on value-added resellers to move merchandise, and an ecosystem that aligns partners to create new value in a structured way.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“2.   As you expand the value proposition, will your existing partners continue to accept their current role?”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Two litmus test questions offer guidance as to whether expansion is within or across ecosystems: 1.   As you expand the value proposition, will your new partners find your leadership claim to be at least as convincing as your current partners find it to be?”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“What matters in an ecosystem is not just what you want to do with others, but what others are willing to do with you.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Leading in ecosystems is different than leading in industries. In industries, leadership is measured as your own competitive outcome—relative market share, profits, brand strength, etc. In ecosystems, leadership is not an outcome but a role. It is measured in terms of your ability to align others around a value architecture that delivers the value proposition. This means that we must distinguish between leading an ecosystem (role) and participating in a leading ecosystem (outcome).”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“As we saw with ASSA ABLOY earlier, Wolters Kluwer and Zebra Technologies show how the ability to draw at scale on resources and relationships from the legacy business can offer great leverage in supporting the new value proposition while, simultaneously, the ability to leverage the new proposition can create advantage for the old proposition.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“The biggest advantage to innovating incumbents is their ability to leverage their existing position with customers to gain knowledge and build traction for their new value propositions. Incumbents that isolate their new initiatives from the main business undermine their ability to leverage this power.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Vision, staying power, and patience are the necessary ingredients for being able to move out of Quadrant 4. Absent vision, you should not get in. Absent patience and staying power, you will not make it out. The question is what to do while you are waiting.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“technology races, helps us to see the critical drivers of timing. For the new value proposition, the key factor is how quickly its overall ecosystem can be developed for users to realize the new technology’s potential.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“When both factors are in play—the new value proposition’s rise hampered by ecosystem emergence delays, and the old value proposition’s trajectory augmented by ecosystem extensions—thinking in term of value creation (rather than performance) becomes even more important.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Improvements in the competitiveness of the old value proposition (the upward shift in the old value proposition trajectory in figure 4.3) push the point of the new value proposition’s superiority farther and farther away (point C). These shifts can be rooted in improvements in the old technology itself; improvements in the broader ecosystem; or in improvements that arise because of innovations developed to enable the new value proposition itself, and benefit the old value proposition as well.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“Innovating within an ecosystem means recognizing that there are multiple elements that need to be aligned. The readiness of a given technology does not offset the bottlenecks created when other pieces are not ready. This means that, beyond managing your own execution, you need to be aware of the emergence challenges that reside elsewhere within your ecosystem.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“In a world of ecosystems, being early often means waiting for other elements and partners to arrive before the real race starts. For defenders, the question is when to actively engage the new proposition—when to shift resources to the yet-to-be-proven offer and reduce investment in the historical, profitable core. Reacting too early means loss of margin; reacting too late means loss of position. For attackers, the frustration of waiting is amplified as the old regime continues on its own trajectory of incremental improvement. The would-be disruptor is stuck at the starting line, while the finish line moves farther and farther away.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“they should be at least as fearful of being too early and exhausting their resources before the revolution actually begins.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World

“If you are first to the starting line and then waiting for the flag, you have won the wrong race.”
― Ron Adner, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World