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Success is not a zero-sum game

Lead on Purpose

In games like chess , one person wins and the other loses. Life in the business world at times feels like a zero-sum game. The following resources substantiate my claim that success is not a zero-sum game : According to Steve Farber — author of Greater Than Yourself — the only way for knowledge to truly lead to power in a person’s life is for that person to give it away. There are probabably more than one game being played in this situation.

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Why success is a positive-sum game

Lead on Purpose

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which one person’s gain is exactly balanced by another person’s loss. In games like chess, one person wins and the other loses. The win (+1) added to the loss … Continue reading → Trust Uncategorized achievement positive success

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Why success is a positive-sum game

Lead on Purpose

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which one person’s gain is exactly balanced by another person’s loss. In games like chess, one person wins and the other loses. The win (+1) added to the loss … Continue reading → Trust Uncategorized achievement positive success

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Applying Game Theory to the Supreme Court Confirmation Fight

Harvard Business Review

“Politics is not a game,” Winston Churchill once said. ” And yet like any business, politics is rife with strategic challenges and opportunities that game theory can help elucidate. Politics is indeed an earnest business, but Garland’s stalled nomination shows how politics is also a game, albeit one that cannot be reduced to simply winning or losing. HBR STAFF. “It is an earnest business.”

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Weekly Round-Up: 3 Lessons in Mental Toughness, Supporting Employees During COVID-19, Test of Leadership, Creating a Crisis Communications Strategy

leaderCommunicator

If you've seen the movie, "A Beautiful Mind," you'll know John Nash was the Princeton genius who received the Nobel Prize for founding non-cooperative, Game Theory.

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How to Help Managers Become More Strategic

Let's Grow Leaders

In mining, leaders must understand the strategic implications of cost curves, game theory, and real-options valuation; further, they must know and be sensitive to the stakeholders in their regulatory and societal environment, many of whom can directly influence their opportunities to create value. John’s frustration had turned to exacerbation. He’d done everything he could to position himself for the next promotion. His results were amazing.

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Al Roth’s Pioneering Work In “Market Design”

First Friday Book Synopsis

To check out all the resources, sign up for free email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here. * * * Al Roth, expert in game theory, experimental economics, and market design, is all about getting economists more [.]. Here’s an article written by Martha E. Mangelsdorf and featured online by MIT Sloan Management Review.

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The Prisoner’s (Hedge Fund) Dilemma

CO2

The payoffs hedge fund employees are real, but the business has the feel of a game. They follow the game theory as outlined in the Prisoner’s Dilemma –where as long as both prisoners accused of a crime stay silent, they both receive the least punishment. The game may be up for SAC. by Gary Cohen. SAC Manager Arrested for Insider Trading at Hedge Fund.

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Do You Play To Win Or To Keep The Game Going?

My Own Coach

But there was something engaging in this fifteen minute short about economics and game theory. The programme ended with this thought provoking statement: " You can solve game theory, but in the complexity of life there is always a bigger game " It reminded me of an excellent book that I came across a few years ago, that shifted my approach to competition. Called Finite and Infinite Games by James P. As finite games are everywhere in business.

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How to hack a management system [brief talk]

Ask Atma

Game theory applications – tapping into mutualistic dynamics. [A 5 minute talk given at LA Hackers on April 23, 2011 at Coloft]. My name is Atma. I am an industrial psychologist. That’s kind of like a project manager on academic steroids. I specialize in the psychology of organizations and am currently working on my PhD in this topic. Part of the power of organizational psychology is that it leverages emotional energy.

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Brands Represent Risk Mitigation for Consumers

Strategy Driven

Some economists explain brands from a game-theory perspective. They say that brands are a mechanism for companies to engage customers in repeated games. No trust can be created in a one-time game. Because it’s a one-time game. That’s because stopping at a McDonald’s right off a highway is a one-time game for that specific location. It’s only a repeated game from the perspective of the company’s national headquarters.

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How to Create Remarkable Teams PART 2 – Collaboration

Ask Atma

You must have an attitude of, “Everybody wins or the game’s not worth playing.” Economics and game theory also provide valuable insight into the study of trust (cf. If You Want Remarkable Teams… Build for Collaboration. If you want a great race car, you build it for speed. If you want great teams, you build them for collaboration.

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Strategy Lessons From Jean Tirole

Harvard Business Review

He then usually brings in the tools of game theory, in which his protagonists have to contend with other rational actors and the moves they might make. The basic story is that early antitrust and regulatory ideas that didn’t have much basis in economic theory were brushed aside in the 1970s and 1980s by the University of Chicago-based “law and economics” movement, which basically taught that competition conquers all, even in pretty concentrated industries.

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Why Your Company Should Partner with Rivals

Harvard Business Review

By translating game theory into pragmatic business strategy, Co-opetition cleverly showed companies a new path to revenue growth: It's better to own 20 percent share of a $10 billion market than it is to own 75 percent share of a $2 billion market. Therefore it's time to extend the concept of game theory to upstream activities too. There's a flawed belief that your only 'friends' in business are the enemies of your enemy. At one time, this axiom held true.

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Better Ways of Thinking About Risks

Harvard Business Review

It includes decision analysis, game theory, and operations research. Leaders need to understand complex, uncertain dynamic environments well enough to anticipate how initiatives will fare. To that end, they must ensure that critical information is gathered and synthesized. That, in turn, requires recruiting, rewarding, and retaining the best people that their resources allow, then enabling them to use their talents to the fullest.

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Research: Missing Product Information Doesn’t Bother Consumers as Much as It Should

Harvard Business Review

Game theorists have long studied how the “game” of communication and disclosure should play out between consumers and marketers, and how consumers should interpret missing information (i.e., According to game theorists, no. So, the theory goes, every patient will know that a surgeon who does not disclose has one star. However, it was somewhat in line with game-theory predictions regarding disclosure.

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Embrace the Complexity of Cyber Defense

Harvard Business Review

Game Theory is useful for understanding strategic interactions when parties have competing interests. Game Theory can help us understand how better to defend the system, or conversely, how better to evade it. Game Theory is also useful for studying how cooperation can evolve among independent parties, which can guide the choice of policies to encourage desirable behavior.

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Should You Put World of Warcraft on Your Resume?

Harvard Business Review

Harvard has used high-stakes poker as a real-world game theory laboratory for strategic thinking. Demonstrable talent and success at games that mix competitive fire with social skills make a desirable human capital combination. There’s a perceived correlation between real competence in serious games and business effectiveness. A top IT executive recruiter, for example, noted that “his clients haven’t sought hires with game experience.”

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How Blockchain Applications Will Move Beyond Finance

Harvard Business Review

Through a clever mix of game theory and cryptography, bitcoin replicates financial systems’ ability to transfer value, but without any of the labor typically involved in running and securing transactions. To understand the transformation that’s being brought about by blockchain technology, it’s useful to start with its largest implementation to date: bitcoin.

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How to Make Unlimited Vacation Time Work at Your Company

Harvard Business Review

But there’s some evidence to suggest that showing trust in others actually helps them trust you more – researchers who study game theory consistently find that when one person shows faith in another, the second person’s faith in others also rises. When Netflix’s founder Reed Hastings published the company’s Reference Guide on our Freedom and Responsibility Culture on SlideShare it made an unexpectedly huge impact.

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Understanding the Game Being Played in Washington

Harvard Business Review

It’s a game , played by flawed-but-not-crazy human beings under confusing circumstances. Peyton Young’s “ The Evolution of Conventions ,” one of several works of game theory I plowed my way through this week in an attempt to find a way to think about the government shutdown and looming debt ceiling fight that didn’t make me want to bang my head against a wall. The debt-limit game. But the lesson from game theory is that yeah, schmoozing can help.

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What Watching Too Much Star Trek Gets You

Harvard Business Review

I spent four years in Australia and another in Europe discovering the ways my theory worked — and didn't work — in the real world. The conundrum would not get out of my head, and after months of thinking and researching everything from game theory to IP law, I came up with a business model that would, in fact, make the problem irrelevant (in theory).

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Nate Silver on Finding a Mentor, Teaching Yourself Statistics, and Not Settling in Your Career

Harvard Business Review

But my experience is all working with baseball data, or learning game theory because you want to be better at poker, right? Einstein supposedly said that I don’t trust any physics theory that can’t be explained to a 10-year-old. The future is so different than the past and we really can’t rely on it at all, so it’s really an intuition game.’

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How Apple Pushes Entire Industries Forward

Harvard Business Review

It’s an expert use of product design, network effects, and game theory all wrapped up in one move. Yesterday, hardware stole the show at the Apple unveiling. But Apple’s most impressive achievement on display at yesterday’s announcement was not a technological feat — although the technology on display was certainly impressive. Apple’s great feat was the use of their scale to swiftly get the world lined up behind a new model for payments.

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A Wall Won’t Secure the U.S.-Mexico Border, but Economic Policy Could

Harvard Business Review

In game theory, this sort of situation is known as a “chicken-and-egg problem.” ” Fortunately, game theory provides a way to crack such strategic challenges: by incentivizing either side to “move first” in choosing legal over undocumented immigration. President Trump campaigned on a promise to “build a great, great wall on our southern border.”