Play Bigger

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 business strategy 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 this discipline, 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.- Category Design: Learn the groundbreaking discipline for creating a new market, conditioning customers so they abandon the old and embrace your new solution.- Become a Category King: Discover why the company that builds a legendary category is the one that wins, capturing 76% of the total market capitalization.- The Lightning Strike: Execute a focused, high-intensity event to seize the market's attention, define the problem, and establish your company as the undisputed leader.- The Flywheel Effect: Understand how legendary companies like Amazon and Salesforce build unstoppable momentum to expand their categories and cement their domination over time.

Al Ramadan is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors. Al co-founded Quokka Sports, which revolutionized the way people experience sport online. He then joined Macromedia and Adobe, where he spent almost ten years changing the way people think about great digital experiences. At Adobe, Al led teams that created the Rich Internet Applications category and helped develop the discipline of experience design. In the early '90s he applied data science to Australia's Americas Cup -- an innovation in sports performance analytics. His work in sailing led directly to the idea for Quokka. He lives in Santa Cruz, Calif.