Coopetition Interactive is © 1996 by the Authors.
When we talk about changing the game, the first thing people usually think
of is changing the rules. But if we ask what rules you might change or how
you might go about changing them, the question often seems perplexing. After
all, most of the rules businesspeople play by are well-established laws
and customs. They have evolved to help ensure that trading practices are
fair, that markets keep operating, and that contracts are honored. To step
outside these rules would be to risk legal penalties or exclusion from the
market.
But there are other rules of the game that it can make sense to change.
Many of these rules are the ones found in contracts. Your contracts with
customers and suppliers shape your transactions with those players in ways
that extend far into the future. A single clause can tilt the balance of
power heavily toward you or against you. By shaping your relations with
customers and suppliers, these same contracts will also shape your relations
with competitors. To be sure you're in a game where you'll make money, you
have to make sure you've got the right rules in your contracts.
What all these more negotiable rules have in common is that they involve
"details." Compared with changes in players or in added values,
the possible changes in rules can seem like a small-scale matter. This makes
them easy to ignore:
But there's another way of looking at it:
As we'll show in this chapter, relatively small changes in the rules of
business can produce enormous changes in the outcomes. In other words, where
business rules are concerned, the details are everything.
To illustrate how this works, we'll look at a variety of rules and analyze
how each one affects the game. This requires imagining that a given rule
is in effect, putting yourself in the other players' shoes, and playing
out the game from all the different perspectives. With a better understanding
of the rule's consequences, you can then decide whether you want to employ
that rule or, if it's a rule that's already there, whether you want to change
it.
There is no mechanism, or algorithm, for generating rules. It's a creative
act. Still, you can get ideas for new rules from a number of sources. One
approach is to find a rule that works in one context and consider whether
it would work in a different one. Take a rule used with your customers and
bring it to negotiations with your suppliers. Or take a rule you see used
to good effect in other businesses and apply it to your own business. The
collection of rules discussed in this chapter should serve as a useful source
of ideas.