1. Why Business Should Be Viewed as a Game

I first sketched this framework more than five years ago, but at the time the world wasn't ready. Many felt that the idea of "business as a game" sounded too light or playful, and the concept didn't find real traction. Now the world has changed. Today, companies that think at the game level—beyond products and markets—are already building their next S-curve before the old one declines, gaining a significant advantage in a rapidly shifting environment.

Business has always been a unique form of social activity where the competitive element is strong—regardless of whether the surrounding society is democratic, market-driven, or authoritarian. Only the ways, rules and boundaries of competition change from one system to another.

Traditional business thinking is built on market models derived from economic theory. These models once provided a clear and effective way to structure products, services, competitors and market shares. This logic worked well in a time when change was slow, predictable, and relatively linear.

But today, market logic no longer keeps pace with the speed and dynamics of reality.
Its slowness and structural rigidity have become bottlenecks for business development:

• markets are no longer stable "fields" but constantly shifting spaces

• competition is no longer a zero-sum game with clearly defined rules

• product/market thinking pulls attention away from people, systems and real dynamics

• value creation happens increasingly outside the market—often before a market even exists

This creates a paradox: right now, success depends on the ability to break away from the very mental models that once enabled growth. The new reality requires a new way of understanding what business is and how value comes into being.

Game Thinking Aligns with Reality

Game dynamics describe today's environment far more accurately:

• boundaries shift

• players change

• new rules emerge constantly

• collaboration and competition intertwine

• value creation begins long before the market and continues long after it

Game theory was formalized in 1944, yet its essence has been used surprisingly little in business frameworks and models. Still, most business leaders intuitively feel that business is a game. They simply haven't been able to include this perspective in formal management thinking, because the history of business theory still assumes that markets sit at the center of everything.

Game thinking finally allows us to recognize the reality in which organizations now operate:
business is not merely competition within markets—it is the game of creating, reshaping, and ending markets.

If you want to explore critiques and counterarguments to this perspective, see: Objections and Responses →

This perspective is needed because it reflects today's business dynamics more realistically than any earlier framework. When viewed as a game, business becomes a sequence of transitions between game spaces—a form of continuous open play where value is created through the interaction of people, teams and systems, not within a pre-defined market.