While at business school, Competitive Strategy and Marketing
Management were my favorite subjects and I ended up specializing in them. Of the two, Competitive strategy was my favorite
simply because it caters to a human’s basic desire to compete and win. As a
co-founder and president of my current company Personagraph, which is a wholly owned subsidiary
of a larger company, I end up using a lot of teachings from the competitive
strategy class by Pai-Ling Yin and the Advanced Competitive Strategy class by
Michael Cusumano. As a product manager in my previous jobs, I benefited a lot
from what I learned from these classes. The only other class, which taught me
more, was the System Architecture class by Prof. Edward Crawley. You can read my
detailed blog on the System Architecture class here.
I have been obsessed with the War Commander game by Kixeye
for the last couple of weeks now. It is an extremely addictive game and I ended
up spending a lot of money buying weapons, for the first time ever. I finally
understand why Zynga is not doing so well in comparison to Kixeye. Apart from being
targeted for a different demographic, it is an extremely well made game. The
hiring video of Kixeye
highlights the type of games they make and the company culture.
I have spent many hours on the game seizing a lot of
territory by attacking and capturing enemy territories and it reminded me of
what I learned in the Competitive Strategy and Game Theory classes. It took me
some time before I recollected what I had read in the book Blue
Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition
Irrelevant by Renee Mauborgne. One of the central themes of the book is
that the competitive strategies are modeled after the archaic war strategies (resources
are limited and the only way to win is to defeat the enemy and capture their resources). My favorite quote from the book is “To focus
on the red ocean is therefore to accept the key constraining factor of war-
limited terrain and the need to beat an enemy to succeed and to deny
distinctive benefit of the business world: the capacity to create new market
space that is uncontested”.
Initially, when I started playing this game, I was
continuously attacking enemy installations for resources (oil and metal). But
once I recollected many of the Blue Ocean strategies and Coopetition theory, I
started searching for new resources (oil fields and metal deposits) and was
able to expand resources much more quickly. It is amazing how many of these lessons
I applied and practiced in the War Commander game. Business schools should make
games like these mandatory part of the course material.
I will write a lot more about Coopetition, Competitive Strategy,
Blue Ocean Strategy and Business Strategy in next few weeks. My main goal for
this blog was to highlight that business schools that focus a lot on theory,
could benefit by incorporating games like War Commander in their curriculum
which provides a platform to practice many of the theories taught in class.
Those of you who have read Sun Tzu’s (a military strategist from china, on of
the greatest military leaders in history) book The
Art of War will be able to apply many of those strategies in this game
as well. If you have not read Sun Tsu, grab a copy from amazon and read if you
plan to make a career in strategy.
