GameChanger, David McAdams
GameChanger, David McAdams
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Game-Changer
Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations

Author: David McAdams

Narrator: David McAdams, Grover Gardner

Unabridged: 6 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 02/01/2014


Synopsis

A radically new, and easily learned, way to outstrategize your rivals.

“The wise win before they fight, while the ignorant fight to win.” So wrote Zhuge Liang, the great Chinese military strategist. He was referring to battlefield tactics, but the same can be said about any strategic situation. Even seemingly certain defeat can be turned into victory—whether in battle, business, or life—by those with the strategic vision to recognize how to “change the game” to their own advantage.
The aim of David McAdams’s Game-Changer is nothing less than to empower you with this wisdom—not just to win in every strategic situation (or “game”) you face but to change those games and the ecosystems in which they reside to transform your life and our lives together for the better.

Game-Changer develops six basic ways to change games—commitment, regulation, cartelization, retaliation, trust, and relationships—enlivened by countless colorful characters and unforgettable examples from the worlds of business, medicine, finance, military history, crime, sports, and more.

The audiobook then digs into several real-world strategic challenges, such as how to keep prices low on the Internet, how to restore the public’s lost trust in for-charity telemarketers, and even how to save mankind from looming and seemingly unstoppable drug-resistant disease. In each case, McAdams uses the game-theory approach developed in the audiobook to identify the strategic crux of the problem and then leverages that “game-awareness” to brainstorm ways to change the game to solve or at least mitigate the underlying problem.

So get ready for a fascinating journey. You’ll emerge a deeper strategic thinker, poised to change and win all the games you play. In doing so, you can also make the world a better place. “Just one Game-Changer [is] enough to seed and transform an entire organization into a more productive, happier, and altogether better place,” McAdams writes. Just imagine what we can do together.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Quinn on November 28, 2018

Wish McAdams would've dug further into the actual theory behind this field of study, rather than providing numerous concrete, overly-specific examples as a way of explaining it all. Overall, I didn't take much away from McAdams' approach to authoring this book -- guess I should have just signed up f......more

Goodreads review by Tara Nichol on September 23, 2019

Great book. Lover of game theory now.......more

Goodreads review by Mimi on September 01, 2019

It’s interesting to revisit the recommendations provided in this book for complex social and environmental problems to see how they’ve been modified and implemented in the few years since this book was published. Some people treat their lives, relationships, careers like it’s all a big game. The auth......more

Goodreads review by Bruno on February 17, 2019

Had some high hopes on the book. Quite interesting intro but the author totally misses it. Dull development and the ending is just an exercise to "kind" of apply game theory to specific examples that seem just odd. Skip it.......more

Goodreads review by Richard on June 23, 2024

At first it looked interesting, but then after I bought it, I had a dread that it would be the book that I so wanted when I first heard of game theory and that I would now abhor - a guide to using game theory to manipulate people and situations and to win negotiations. Fortunately, as I got into rea......more