Play Bigger

In today’s world, it’s no longer enough to create great new products; rather companies now must create whole new categories that destroy old ones. Uber created a new personal transportation category and destroyed taxis and limos. Salesforce.com created a new category of cloud-base sales automation, dethroning the old CRM industry. Airbnb, Workday, Tesla and Netflix are all winning by creating entirely new business categories that destabilise old ones.

The category is the new strategy.

The conclusion: If you want to build a legendary company, you need to design and build a legendary category at the same time, and dominate it over time. Your company needs to be a Category King. And if you don’t design a Category King, you’re creating a failure.

Drawing on examples from within and beyond our own practice, PLAY BIGGER shows both entrepreneurs and established enterprises how to define, develop and rule a category over time.

Author Biography

Dave Peterson, Al Ramadan and Christopher Lochhead are the founders of Play Bigger, a consulting firm in Silicon Valley that is on a mission to position great technology companies to become Category Kings. They specialize in category design – the discipline of conditioning a market to generate market pull and market cap. Dave, Al and Christopher are former entrepreneurs and executives with twenty-five year careers in the technology business. Today they are players turned coaches. For PLAY BIGGER they have joined forces with veteran journalist Kevin Maney.