Play Bigger

**Author:** Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** How legendary companies like Amazon, Salesforce, and Uber don't just build better products. They create entirely new market categories and then dominate them. You'll learn the discipline of category design, how to develop a powerful point of view, how to mobilize your organization, and how to apply these principles to your own career.

**Who This Book Is For:** Entrepreneurs, executives, product leaders, marketers, and anyone who wants to understand why some companies capture most of the value in their markets while everyone else fights for scraps. It's also for individuals who want to position themselves as leaders in emerging fields rather than competitors in crowded ones.

Every year, thousands of companies launch with excellent products, talented teams, and genuine ambition. Most of them fail. Not because their products are bad. Not because their execution is weak. But because they are playing the wrong game. They are trying to be better than their competitors. They benchmark features. They optimize pricing. They refine their marketing messages. They work harder, move faster, and hope that incremental improvements will eventually win the day. Meanwhile, a small number of companies seem to operate in a different universe entirely. They don't compete for market share. They create markets that didn't exist before. They define problems that customers didn't know they had. They establish new language, new metrics, new buying criteria. And then they capture the overwhelming majority of the value in the markets they created. Think about Salesforce. Before Salesforce, companies bought customer relationship management software from companies like Siebel Systems. They installed it on their own servers. They paid millions of dollars upfront. They hired consultants to customize it. This was the way things worked. Salesforce didn't try to build a better version of Siebel. Instead, Marc Benioff declared that software was dead. He said the future was cloud-based, subscription-based, and simple. He created a new category called cloud computing for enterprise software. And Salesforce became the king of that category. Think about Uber. Before Uber, if you wanted a ride, you stood on a street corner and waved your arm. Taxis were regulated, often dirty, and frequently unavailable when you needed them most. Uber didn't build a better taxi company. It created a new category: on-demand transportation. It solved a problem people had accepted as unsolvable. And it captured most of the value in the market it created. Think about Amazon. Amazon didn't start by trying to beat Barnes & Noble at the bookstore game. It created a new category: online retail. Then it expanded that category again and again. Online marketplace. Cloud computing. Voice-activated commerce. Each…