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Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff, Co-opetition, New York: Currency Doubleday, 1996. 290 pages.
I.
Co-opetition can be an important benchmark for those who shape the widening discourse about the "greening of business" (hereafter, Green Business). It is not that coauthors Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff pay much attention to the natural environment. None of the competitors who occupy the Co-opetition conceptual framework get their hands dirty or their faces windburned.1 Other than one, one-page case buried in the book's midsection (p. 127), there is nothing "green" about the playing field of competition that Brandenburger and Nalebuff portray. Ironically, this separation between competition and the natural world is precisely why Co-opetition should be useful in Green Business circles.
The Green Business discourse can make two distinct and lasting intellectual contributions to our thinking about the playing fields of competition. Each contribution draws on, and adds to, the concept of human connection.2 The significance of that potential contribution comes into clear view when we realize that competitors are strangers on the playing field of competition where Brandenburger and Nalebuff situate Co-opetition.
II
Co-opetition is a breezy, energetic, and case-filled application of game theory to business problems. Brandenburger and Nalebuff propose that game theory makes it logically possible to telescope cooperation and competition into a clever hybrid idea called co-opetition. The coauthors credit Ray Noorda at Novell with coining the term (see also Petzinger, 1997). Brandenburger and Nalebuff offer co-opetition as a challenge to the maxim that one cannot practice both cooperation and competition.
Brandenburger and Nalebuff argue that winning in modern business competitions is often attributable to the winners' simultaneous mastery of two skills. First, winning competitors take steps to enlarge the market "pie" from which they can feed themselves and from which their rivals, suppliers, and customers can feed, too.3 Second, winning competitors make sure that they are in a position to devour the lion's share of that "pie."
Brandenburger and Nalebuff call these skills "cooperation" and "competition," respectively. To catch the reader's attention, the coauthors translate this pairing of cooperation and competition into the practice of "peace and war."4 What makes this dual mastery possible, Brandenburger and Nalebuff argue, is a mastery of the fundamental principles of game theory. The mark of...