"The wise win before they fight, while the ignorant fight to win." So
wrote Zhuge Liang, the great Chinese military strategist. He was
referring to battlefield tactics, but the same can be said about any
strategic situation. Even seemingly certain defeat can be turned into
victory--whether in battle, business, or life--by those with the
strategic vision to recognize how to "change the game" to their own
advantage.
The aim of David McAdams's Game-Changer is nothing less than to
empower you with this wisdom--not just to win in every strategic
situation (or "game") you face but to change those games and the
ecosystems in which they reside to transform your life and our lives
together for the better.
Game-Changer develops six basic ways to change games--commitment,
regulation, cartelization, retaliation, trust, and
relationships--enlivened by countless colorful characters and
unforgettable examples from the worlds of business, medicine, finance,
military history, crime, sports, and more.
The book then digs into several real-world strategic challenges, such as
how to keep prices low on the Internet, how to restore the public's lost
trust in for-charity telemarketers, and even how to save mankind from
looming and seemingly unstoppable drug-resistant disease. In each case,
McAdams uses the game-theory approach developed in the book to identify
the strategic crux of the problem and then leverages that
"game-awareness" to brainstorm ways to change the game to solve or at
least mitigate the underlying problem.
So get ready for a fascinating journey. You'll emerge a deeper strategic
thinker, poised to change and win all the games you play. In doing so,
you can also make the world a better place. "Just one Game-Changer
[is] enough to seed and transform an entire organization into a more
productive, happier, and altogether better place," McAdams writes. Just
imagine what we can do together.
