Reading List: Play Bigger

Readinglist Playbigger

Winning big today means playing big, according to the authors of this enthusiastic but serious book. And that means creating a new game with new rules and then dominating it. Play Bigger is the work of a three-man Silicon Valley advisory team that, according to co-writer Kevin Maney, “gets paid large sums of money to help companies do exactly what’s in this book. (So you’re getting it cheap!)”

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The authors conducted interviews and analyzed data to peer into the inner workings of revolutionary companies such as Amazon, Uber and IKEA in pursuit of transformative ways of doing business. They emerge with what they call “category design,” a discipline they say enables a company to generate demand where none existed, influence the thinking and buying habits of customers, and create a brand-new market. Category design may derive primarily from examples in the tech industry, but the authors promise that it applies to any business.

Play Bigger
By Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney
June; HarperBusiness; $29

 

This article originally appeared in the June 2016 issue of SUCCESS magazine.

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Chauncey Mabe is a freelance writer, book critic, and blogger in Miami, Fla. For 23 years he served as Book Editor and Senior Entertainment Writer at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. He was Book Blogger for the Florida Center for the Literary Arts, the parent organization of Miami Book Fair International, from 2009 to 2012. He also blogs for the Betsy Hotel South Beach hotel, which sponsors literary events year round. His reviews and feature stories have appeared in publications such as the Toronto Globe & Mail, the Serving House Journal, Inspicio, the Palm Beach Arts Paper, the Baltimore Sun, the Juneau Empire, and the Chicago Tribune.

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