Play Bigger

How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

By: Play Bigger LLC, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal a groundbreaking discipline called category design.

Winning today isn't about beating the competition at the old game. It's about inventing a whole new game - defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can't build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you're going to lose.

In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of "category kings" - companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA - that give us new ways of living, thinking, or doing business, often solving problems we didn't know we had.

In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying category design, companies can create new demand where none existed, conditioning customers' brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal careers.

Crossing the Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator's Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself.

©2016 Alan Ramadan, Dave Peterson, and Christoph (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers

the best business book I've eve read

Incredibly profound, funny, catching and intense.
Lots of insights that have shifted my attention towards what truly matters in entrepreneurship

Amazing insight

Best book I have read in many years! Playbook is a guide on how to win, not just another book of stories of winners. I will be implementing what I read!

Great but

Having been an engineer at GoTo and Overture, I was confused by the inaccuracy of how Google defined revenue generation in search. Knowing that backline very well, I was left to wonder if there were any other inaccuracies. However, stories where there just to illuminate the content and I felt the content was great.

life changing

life changing life changing life changing life changing life changing life changing life changing life changing life changing life changing life changing life changing woo woooo wooo wooooooo woooooo

Innovative Idea

I read a lot of books and at times many seem to have very similar messages. Play Bigger is not one of those books. It brings forth a very new and innovative way of looking at building your business and yourself.

Not your average business book

By far the most useful and thought provoking business concept I have read this far! This book forced me to rethink my business and my strategy.

Design and Build to be a Category King

Any additional comments?

Early on in the book the authors are all described as “crazy.” Don’t let this description turn you off. If Christopher Lockhead is any example, theirs’ is the kind of high energy crazy that comes with brilliance. I worked with Christopher when he was CMO at Vantive and he was one of the most inspirational evangelist I’d ever heard or witnessed in action. The energy of Christopher, Dave and Al doesn’t come out in this book, but their big ideas come out in a BIG way.

So what? There are a lot of management and entrepreneurial books out there with big ideas and I’ve listened to/read a lot of them (Start With Why and The Hard Thing About Hard Things being two of my favorites.) Why is this one different and why should you care?

If you’re just out to build a new feature or making something just enough better to be attractive and bought by another bigger player, this book isn’t for you. But if you want to, or know you’re already building something different and it can be a market changer, this book can help you make that happen from idea/category design, through refining your message, to launch, execution and ongoing redesign. (Ref. some of the good, thorough book reviews on Amazon for more details on this.)

This book gives you the process and strategies for being disruptive and becoming what they call a Category King.

My epiphany, when listening to this book, was the eye opener that what our startup really is building is a new category and that we should be positioning it that way. What we are building is “different” and it will be a huge game changer, it isn’t just “better” than what our competition is doing (although it is that too.) When you’re really close to your own great idea on how you can address a problem, it’s really easy to think that you’re doing something much “better” than the competition, probably because you originally built it just to be better, but when you start to think about how it’s “different,” or better yet you specifically design it to be different and learn how to exploit that in your messaging, you can change the way people think about what they need in order to solve the problem YOU have defined. What they “need” is your different solution. Sure, you’d think that’s a no-brainer, but listen to the book and you’ll get how it’s more complicated than that and how their strategy and process can help you from cradle to grave (or exit, or the next evolution) to make it happen.

The case examples were also valuable, but I would have liked more of them. I specifically gained from the Tableau example which is very close to our “new” strategy (since listening to this book) within our own category.

Consider listening to this book at 1.25x speed.

Inspiring

Love everything about this book it was decisively insightful and a great pleasure to reading. I needed every word for the journey I’m about to embark on.

2nd time reading Play Bigger is even better.

Get your notepad ready, your brain is gonna need to dump some genius on the page. I recommend this book often, and I regularly come back to chapters and notes taken. I'm a big fan of Christopher Lochhead, and his podcast(s) - this channel of business education is integral to the foundation of any venture... if your intention is to be successful in change-maker kinda way. The companion book, Niche Down is also a winner.

Very Silicone Valley

This is one in the crowded category of how to be The Best. In that sense, they failed to create a new category, which is largely the subject of the book. Nonetheless, they do a fairly nice job of laying out the components of creating a category. While their focus is on Google, Facebook, Uber, etc., it is not hard to translate this to more humble setting that that are the lives of most people taking in the book. I would have liked a bit more of the application to companies and lives that are not going to start new industries or liberate India, but there is is plenty here to work with.