Book Brief: Play Bigger
How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
Brief Summary
Title: Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
Authors: Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney
Published: 2016 by Harper Business
What It Teaches: Play Bigger teaches innovators how to create new product categories and become the category king.
When To Use It: If your company isn’t #1 in its category, the authors would argue that you need to create a new category. If you are #1 in your category, the authors would argue you either need to be harvesting the category, expanding the category, or creating new categories. If any of those fit your situation, you should read Play Bigger.
The authors list 10 reasons you shouldn’t read the book:
- You think the company with the best product wins.
- You believe there is room for a lot of winners in a market.
- You’re okay with being good enough.
- - 10. You aren’t bold enough or smart enough to win in today’s markets (just worded in 7 different ways).
Unlike the authors, I don’t think category making is for everyone. Category making is hard, expensive, and takes years. The authors don’t hide that truth. If you wonder whether or not you should be creating a new category, I’d recommend you read this book so that you understand what it would take, and then make your decision.
Brief Review
Play Bigger is probably the best book on the market today explaining what category creation is and how to do it. That being said, I hope someone ignores the advice in this book against entering an existing category and takes a shot at writing a better one. This book is good, but I think there’s room for better.
The beginning and the end of the book make it pretty clear that Al, Dave, and Christopher were the brains behind the book and Kevin was the one who could translate their stories and lessons into a very readable book and that teaming works pretty well. Kevin is a technology journalist and author. The other three have done category creation at a variety of companies for a few decades and now have formed Play Bigger, a company to help others do the same.
In general, the book has the feel that the authors are “shooting from the hip.” I don’t envy Kevin’s job. The three partners come across as a bit out there — telling lots of stories, often crazy stories, and not necessarily having a firm structure to reign in the madness.
The final chapter explains their process pretty clearly: “It might seem like we knew everything that’s in this book on day one, and we just had to write down the words to capture what we had in our heads. But that would not be how it happened. We started the book full of implicit knowledge about Silicon Valley, category kings, and tactics such as lightning strikes. We embarked on the data research, interviewed a cross section of founders of category kings, and studied dozens of other companies and individuals. Once we’d done a good deal of that work, the four of us started meeting regularly for sessions at Christopher’s house in Santa Cruz. We’d talk and argue for a day or two about a concept in the book, and having four of us in the house for long stretches produced some kind of magic as we built on each other’s ideas and took them to an entirely new level. … After each session together, Kevin would go off and write what we thought we said, and then share the document with all of us. Seeing it on paper would provoke a new round of discussion, and that would make the ideas even better (at least we thought so). Kevin would again go off for another round of writing. After a couple of these cycles, we’d wrap up a chapter and move on to the next topic.”
What emerged from that process is a pretty well structured and helpful book. There are three parts. The first part (“The Category King Economy”) explains why category design (as they call it) matters and what it is. The second part (“The Category King Playbook”) explains how to go about creating a new category. The third part (“The Enduring Category King”) explains what to do after you’ve successfully created the category.
The heart of the book is in Part II — the category design process. The section is broken into four chapters representing the four stages of category design: discover a category, develop a point of view, mobilize the company, and condition the market. Each chapter is dominated by stories. Some of those stories are first person stories involving the authors working with different companies in category making. Some are third person stories of companies studied by the authors. The stories are what make the book as good as it is, and the authors do a good job of extracting relevant and applicable lessons from the stories. The last section of each chapter is “The Play Bigger Guide to [whatever the chapter was about]”. This is literally a step-by-step process for doing that part of category design.
The biggest issue I have with the book is that it seems to present the whole process as simply a matter of following each step contained in each chapter. They don’t hide the fact that some of those steps are really hard (which is good), but I honestly don’t think that’s how it works. I get the sense that the Play Bigger team never walks into a company and says “okay, here’s the project plan. We’re going to make sure you follow all these steps and, at the end, you’ll be king of a new category.” I think that every company and every situation is unique. What you do when and how varies dramatically from case to case. The reason the Play Bigger team is so good at what they do is because they sense and respond to each unique situation, and they work with their clients to do what’s needed to be successful. It’s not “paint by numbers” but the book makes it feel like it is.
One other aspect of the book that I don’t appreciate is what might best be described as irreverence. Perhaps to identify with pirates, innovators, and others that don’t have to play by the rules, the authors comfortably mix profanity into their writing. Just as that language gets mixed into many business conversations, I don’t have a problem filtering it out and focusing on the real message, but I mention it in case that would be too much of a turn-off for you.
Bottom line: Play Bigger provides an excellent guide to what is involved in creating a new category and owning it. While I seriously doubt that any company could simply follow the steps outlined in the book and be successful, laying it out in this structured way makes it easy to get a sense for the level of commitment required to be successful. Most companies will need to work with someone who can help them navigate the still uncharted waters of their new category. The stories throughout the book help the reader sense both the excitement of what is possible and the complexity of achieving it. I heartily recommend Play Bigger to anyone considering creating their own product category.
