J PROD INNOV MANAG 2013;30(1):186–188
© 2012 Product Development & Management Association
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5885.2012.00994.x
Book Reviews
Book reviews in this issue:
• Repeatability: Build Enduring Business for a World of
Constant Change
• Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry:
Avoiding the Performance Trap
Repeatability: Build Enduring Business for a
World of Constant Change
Chris Zook and James Allen. Boston: Harvard Business
Review Press, 2012. 288 pages. US$30.00.
Zook and Allen’s Repeatability is a careful study of a
very serious business question: how to keep going when
the going is uncertain. Popular belief has it that tough
gets going when the going gets tough. Repeatability adds
the notion that simplicity gets going when the going gets
complex. Untie the knots. See through the maze. Stick to
the core. And, take it from Repeatability, you are there.
To remain simple, stick to the core of your existence.
Complexities compound as companies grow. Think of
size, diversity, or focus. Each contributes its share of
complexities. Unless the companies can create a path on
their own going in this wilderness, they are certain to fall
prey to the multitudes of Darwinian onslaughts and go
extinct in the process, like a good majority of the business
species which populated honor scrolls until the other day.
Question of sustenance troubles one and all, in all
ages, subtly or otherwise. The closer to the solution you
reach, the longer you survive. In a 2003 paper, Hamel and
Välikangas argued that companies need to be resilient:
“In a turbulent age, the only dependable advantage is a
superior capacity for reinventing your business model
before circumstances force you to.” More recently, Mark
Johnson (2010) brought out that it is the way you do
things in your business that makes all the difference. So
you better organize things well, go after the hot pursuit of
the barriers to your transformation; thenceforth, if you are
to taste success at the end of the day, for whatever you did
to reach here cannot take you there. You ought to undergo
reincarnation periodically, in order to continue through
the ages.
The three principles of Repeatability can come in as
handy in taking the readers someway nearer to the open
secret: Find sustenance in your
i. Strong, well-differentiated core—Principle 1,
ii. Clear non-negotiables—Principle 2, and
iii. Systems for closed loop learning—Principle 3.
Principle 1 will lead you to ponder the assets and
capabilities lying at the heart of this differentiation. Busi-
ness problems are often always unique in perspectives
and prospects, commonly inviting a project management
approach in individual situations. This resource-based
outlook allows repeating your thrusts with a process ori-
entation and strives for attempting perfection via practice
(p. 67) in arriving at a solution. Leveraging the core
makes the responses profound, powerful, and reflective in
a demanding business context. When you consciously use
your strengths, you know you can repeat yourself at ease.
Zook and Allen’s propositions are so straightforward
and obvious that you almost get to view them as axioms
rather than some rigorously conceptualized theories. This
is the precise strength of Repeatability. It reflects the
essence of practice from beginning to end. Zook and
Allen were at such precincts of practice since their 2001
publication (2001), updated later in 2010, just prior to the
coming of the present scaled up text (2012) in the similar
vein. According to its Principle 2, not everything in a
business is negotiable. Those which aren’t negotiable
determine its character. Business crises come to test you
on non-negotiables, not on the business as usual. When
the question faced is of making a choice between the
arduous path and an easy way out of the impasse, the role
of core values and beliefs (p. 104), like The Nike maxims,
carefully chosen example of MSC Industrial Supply
Company, turnaround of DaVita, could be the cases in
point.
Then you keep learning on and on. It’s all rosy when
businesses taste success. Zook and Allen caution that they
must not be oblivious ever of the elusiveness of adapt-
ability. Challenge of uncertainty tells that “there can be
no simple panacea for businesses with a model that needs
to adapt, and with a management team feeling anxiety,
fatigue, resource scarcity, the pressure of quarterly earn-
ings, and uncertainty about what the right answer may
BOOK REVIEWS
be” (p. 131). Nothing can be closer to truth. Now the
question will loom large: where do we learn from?
Repeatability has it for us here that it ought to be from all
around, and in closed loop (Principle 3), as Apple, LEGO
Group, Proctor & Gamble epitomize. Learning for them
happens from the Core Customers, Key Operations,
Frontline Employees (closer to the customers), and
opportunities galore. Mighty experience curves provide
an ocean of limitless opportunities, in pushing all the
frontiers of quality, delivery and cost backward, which
the proficient companies actively pursue as the essence of
strategy. Systems for learning are becoming a now
“essential test” of the robustness of all strategies (p. 157).
The following chapter on leadership behavior then
seeks to help a CEO and the management team to sustain
and adapt the repeatable models of their company, and to
fight the drags thereof. CEOs ought to support and
sponsor the guiding principles to the hilt. The CEOs must
own the learning processes too, for the employees would
love to excel in some cause to which their boss is sold.
People love to be part of the A-Team in their organiza-
tions. CEOs should make it a point to relate with their
people on a simple note and so will their people be, which
the leaders ought to facilitate.
The authors conclude the text by underscoring the
utility of simplicity in underpinning the essence of the
Repeatable Models. One must make great effort to
achieve simplicity, which is more easily said than done.
In a lighter vein, readers can easily recall their painful (!)
experience of elementary math classes, when they were
asked to simplify a complex mathematical expression of
that level, and how confusing it was. Unless they had
learned the real expertise to simplify, they’d always get
the answers wrong; simplification would be most
complex art and craft at every standard respectively. This
conundrum continues and assumes only larger proportion
in personal and professional life as we grow up and come
to confront bigger challenges, uncertainties notwith-
standing. “The growth of complexity makes organiza-
tions (primarily) confused about who the customer is” (p.
194). All hell breaks loose; responses become erratic,
hegemony and self-punishment in the name of attempting
customer satisfaction coming to stay put at the either end
of the same spectrum.
The book includes Top Ten Conclusions at the end,
three Appendices on authors’ Research Methodology,
a Repeatable Model Diagnostic tool, and a Summary
of Top Thirty Case Studies, respectively. This further
enhances its value for the readers. Overall, this is a well-
researched read, which a connoisseur can be recom-
mended to consume with careful and closer application of
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2013;30(1):186–188
mind. It has a rich repertoire of powerful examples, many
clues for making our own organizations more “repeat-
able.” In spite of all these, the book is pleasantly “simple”
to peruse from cover to cover, exemplifying its “repeat-
able” model in its own way. It has been so far a wonderful
experience reading the book. Doing it at a slow pace, with
reflection from time to time on one’s own experience, can
become an additional source of enjoyment for some, who
might get a guided walk down the memory lane this way
with a possible reflection on their experiential barriers
and enablers.
References
Hamel, G., and L. Välikangas. 2003. The quest for resilience. Harvard
Business Review 81 (9): 52–63.
Johnson, M. W. 2010. Seizing the white space: Business model innovation
for growth and renewal. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
Zook, C., and J. Allen. 2001. Profit from the core: Growth strategy in an era
of turbulence. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
Zook, C., and J. Allen. 2010. Profit from the core: A return to growth in
turbulence. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
S. S. Pal
Amity University Business School, Noida, India
Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game
Industry: Avoiding the Performance Trap
David Wesley and Gloria Barczak. Surrey, UK: Gower,
2010. 266 + xiv pages. US$124.95.
Rock stars, athletes, first-person shooters, and personal-
ized characters that video game players adopt or embody
are modern innovations. But how did video gaming win
its mainstream role, and what lessons can be learned from
its past toward future new product development (NPD)
success? Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game
Industry addresses such questions with an historical
analysis of industry players that have engaged, skirted,
and flirted with potentially disruptive innovations.
Authors Wesley and Barczak provide an analytical
chronology of the growth of the video game industry
(VGI) from the early 1980s. Enduring players Nintendo,
Microsoft, and Sony are prominent as the writers review
the emergence of various product innovations with an
introduction, 11 numbered chapters, a conclusion, and
an epilogue.
188 J PROD INNOV MANAG
2013;30(1):186–188
The book’s introduction specifies powerful factors
accounting for the commercial resilience of video gaming
that include: first, a “staycation” (p. 3) effect, whereby
outside-the-home entertainment price inflation drives
people to engage in home-based leisure pursuits; and
second, attractive innovations by game publishers and
hardware engineers, whereby new designs appeal to
wider segments of the populace. The authors then illus-
trate how VGI companies seeking innovation often focus
on acquiring and marketing cutting-edge technology or
design architecture, and that chasing such breakthrough
capabilities can lead organizations to overlook ful-
filling customer needs in the “performance trap” (p. 5)
phenomenon.
Chapter 1 explores the case of how juggernaut Nin-
tendo launched the early 1980s gaming industry perfor-
mance race by catering to dedicated or “hardcore” game
players. The authors point out that the inertial pull of
exploiting established technologies, products, and strate-
gies can actually be a powerful delimiter as such firms
shy away from producing disruptive innovations, and that
Nintendo dodged this bullet by repeatedly employing
an outside-the-mainstream perspective. Notable VGI
innovation occurred as the sector moved beyond simple
arcade-style scoring games toward increasingly complex
action games with engaging story lines and characters. A
gaming “product life cycle” (p. 24) is seen to begin with:
(1) early game and console development, that (2) begets
feature creep and complexity, and which later leads to (3)
the subtraction of certain elements resulting in simplified
games, and subsequently renewed new product success;
i.e., a sequence of simple to complex to simple. Chapter
2 further chronicles Nintendo in an industry standards-
setting context. Other issues discussed include youth
gambling, violent content, monopolistic practices, and
product piracy. Introduced is the significance that func-
tional attributes like image detail can have on customer
attraction and retention as game players build emotional
connections with in-game characters. Also shown is the
strategic importance of independent game development
studios that can be attracted or repelled by licensing free-
doms or constraints.
The third chapter reviews Sony’s mid-1990s and
later PlayStation product offerings, and it relates the case
of how disk-based media replaced game cartridges as
a dominant product design. Chapter 4 surveys the
BOOK REVIEWS
Microsoft Xbox brand’s growth while illustrating the
evolution of customer needs from performance features
like speed and graphics to services such as social online
play with controller-based player interactivity. The fifth
chapter entails the Game Boy brand and other handheld
devices that helped bring gaming to the adult mainstream.
Underscored is the Apple iPhone, hailed as the “first truly
successful” (p. 99) technological convergence device
(Jenkins, 2006) in the video gaming space, serving vari-
ously as mobile gaming console, video game point of
purchase, Web browser, social networking tool, et cetera.
Chapter 6 is a cautionary tale of rushing untested prod-
ucts to market, while the next chapter describes the case
of a typical performance trap. Industry standard adoption
or establishing dominant design is detailed in Chapter 8.
Chapters 9 through 11 analyze recent innovations in
easily accessible or simpler games adopted by heretofore
nongamers. For instance, in place of hardcore or complex
games are casual gaming products such as Nintendo’s
innovative Wii (pronounced “we”) titles, plus arcade,
puzzle, and music or party games like Guitar Hero.
The conclusion is a lucid assemblage of reminders,
axioms, and insights related to the book’s case examples,
with both industry successes and failures providing
innovation management lessons. Clearly, successful
VGI innovation involves avoiding the performance trap
through research and NPD ideation practices that lead to
valued gaming experiences among customers, a theme
reinforced in the epilogue concerning sector trends and
future pathways.
Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry
interweaves insightful industry understandings with
product innovation theory in a case-based format that
should interest industry professionals and enthusiasts.
Students of marketing and strategy will value the work as
thorough case research of a domain rife with innovation.
As an academic textbook for sector-specific courses or
study, it is the only game in town.
Reference
Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide.
New York: New York University Press.
Erik A. J. Johnson
Columbia University