Snack: War Game

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Hey everybody, welcome to another snack size edition of our show How Success Happens. I'm Dan Bova, writer and editor at entrepreneur.com. If you are a child of the 80s like I am, the phrase, want to play a game, brings about delightful images of global thermal nuclear war. But if you are an entrepreneur or business leader whose worldly knowledge extends beyond Matthew Broderick movies, you may be familiar with the idea of wargaming your business. Now if you don't know much about it, I highly recommend picking up the book written by this week's guest. Arjan Singh is an expert in helping companies develop strategies through war games, strategic competitive analysis, scenario planning, and building business early warning systems to help them battle through when things go bad. And if you listen to this podcast or are in business, you know inevitably things are going to go bad and you're going to need to fix some problems. And this book is designed to help you fix those problems before they even happen. Arjan is an adjunct professor of marketing and global consulting at Southern Methodist University, Cox School of Business. He advises hundreds of companies.
If you can't tell, the guy's really, really smart and I would definitely recommend picking up this book. So it's called Competitive Success. It's all about how you build winning strategies by doing corporate war games. He calls it a dress rehearsal for strategies. So, you know, a lot of companies and organizations, they kind of just go for it. And then if it doesn't work out, they sort of learn the hard way that, oh, wait, we didn't really position this right or we went after the wrong customer or something about this went totally wrong. It puts them in a tough position. They got to think on their feet. They're pivoting, they're freaking out, all that kind of fun stuff. So this book really talks about the importance of doing dresser rehearsals. So you can prepare for these things and you can give yourself a competitive edge. And the book actually outlines a step by step process for doing all this. So lucky for you, I asked Arjan to share that process and he gave us a sort of quick overview of how it all works. And it's kind of amazing. But first, before we get into the weeds of how it works, I asked him to give us just to kind of overview a deeper explanation of what wargaming is and how it can help your business.

**Arjan Singh** (4:47)
So wargames are essentially dress rehearsals for organizations. So it's getting a group of people together internally to really role play what your competitive environment looks like. So it could be the competition, it could be the regulatory bodies, it could be Indira Competition, suppliers, customers and others. And it's really around anticipating the behavior of your competitive environment in response to either activities that you're doing or that may change in the business environment. So there's a few different examples that could give you. I can talk about academia. I teach at university and I've been running student wargames for about almost 20 years now. And we do this with students, which is a very similar format to in a corporate environment. We pick and choose different topics for students to work through, and then they represent different companies, and then the build and stress test strategies. So let me give you an example. One of the first student wargames I ran was in 2006, in December 2006 And we called it the Battle for the Living Room. And so the question was, who's going to control entertainment in the living room? And we had six different companies in there. We had Microsoft, which used to make the laptop boxes. We had Verizon, which had all the cable, the files, the content. We had News Corp as well. And then we threw Apple in there as well. And then the whole thing there was, how are you going to win in the living room? So each of the companies had to build strategies. They came back, they were presented to a panel of judges. They would get feedback on it. It's almost like a shark tank type of a thing. And then we'd give them a scenario, respond to a scenario that's happened in a real world. So this game that I've mentioned to you, the reason this one was really interesting was that the Apple team came back and they gave a presentation. They said, look, we've done our analysis, we've got a lot of different assets, we've got the Macs, we've got the MacBooks, we've got the iPods at that point of time.