Play Bigger

Have you ever wondered why some companies utterly transform the world—while others with equally brilliant products fade into obscurity? In Play Bigger, Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney argue that enduring success in modern business demands more than innovation, marketing, or even great execution. Their provocative claim is that the most valuable companies don’t just build products—they build categories. To thrive in today’s hypercompetitive world, you must learn to define and dominate a new space of your own making.

The authors frame their argument around what they call the Category King Economy. As markets have become global, digital, and extraordinarily loud—with billions of connected users and millions of competing solutions—the traditional strategies of product positioning and incremental improvement no longer suffice. Waves of market-defining books—like Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, and The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen—each described older forms of competition: moving to the top of existing markets, bridging innovation gaps, and disrupting incumbents. But in the twenty-first century, the authors contend that these forces have converged into something far more powerful. Now, creating a new category is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Why Categories Matter in the Modern Economy

In this new landscape, attention is scarce. Categories help people organize complexity—the brain wants clear mental shortcuts. Neuroscience, as the authors explain, confirms this through cognitive biases like the anchoring effect (our first impression dominates later decisions) and groupthink bias (we trust choices that everyone else seems to make). These biases mean that the first company to establish a category’s identity often becomes its anchor and leader. Once chosen, consumers rarely switch—even if competitors offer superior products. This is why category kings like Google, Facebook, and Uber capture the majority of industry profits—often 70% to 80% of them.

To succeed, you first teach the world to see a problem differently. Uber didn’t just offer rides—it redefined the concept of urban transportation. The problem wasn’t “needing a taxi” but “how to reliably get around town without owning a car.” When people accept your definition of the problem, you become the reference point for its solution.

Creation Beats Disruption

The key shift in logic is profound: creation beats disruption. Where Christensen taught leaders to overturn existing markets, Play Bigger proposes that legendary companies rise by inventing entirely new markets. Elvis Presley didn’t disrupt jazz—he created rock and roll. Steve Jobs didn’t make a better PC; he created a new experience around digital lifestyle devices. Clarence Birdseye didn’t improve canned food; he invented frozen food and built an ecosystem of freezers, rail cars, and stores around it. These are the creators who change how people think, not merely how they buy.

Category Design: A Discipline of Market Shaping

The book defines a new business discipline—category design—that operates at the intersection of product development, company culture, and market perception. The authors describe this as a “triangle of design”: equal parts product design (building something people love), company design (creating an organization suited to serve the category), and category design (teaching the world to desire the new category itself). These three elements reinforce each other in a “flywheel” of growth. Every part of your company—from engineering to marketing—must align to make the category real in people’s minds.

The authors back this with data: across 4,424 venture-backed tech companies founded between 2000 and 2015, those that became category kings captured 76% of total market capitalization. Their research even uncovered a pattern—the 6–10 Law. Companies that went public six to ten years after founding (the window when a category typically takes off) created the most long-term value. That time span reflects how long it takes the human brain and society to internalize a new way of thinking.

A Call to Modern Leaders

Ultimately, Play Bigger is a call to leadership courage. To create a category, you must bet your career on changing how people think. You must reject short-term revenue in favor of long-term transformation. As the authors put it: “Your number one job is to change the way people think. If you change how they think, they will change how they buy.”

Throughout this summary, we’ll explore how legendary companies—from Apple to Airbnb, from Corning to Salesforce—applied these principles to dominate their markets. You’ll learn why creating categories aligns with how human brains make decisions, how to design a category systematically, and how to expand your company’s potential through continuous category creation. Above all, you’ll see that category is not just one part of strategy—it is the strategy.

Once you realize that creation beats disruption, the next step is mastering the discipline that makes it possible. Category design is the structured process by which companies engineer their market landscape, teaching customers, investors, and partners to see the world their way. The authors call it a systematic way to change thinking and create demand.

Building the Discipline

Ramadan, Peterson, and Lochhead came to this insight after years of trial and error. Working at Macromedia, they faced a “bag of doorknobs” problem—too many disconnected products and no coherent story. Rather than just renaming features, they realized they needed to define a category around experience itself. The result was the phrase “Experience Matters,” and Macromedia became synonymous with web interactivity. Soon after, Adobe acquired it for $3.4 billion.

The process, now known as category design, mirrors earlier waves of innovation in business disciplines. Just as industrial design tamed the chaos of early mechanization and product design shaped the early computer era, category design organizes the modern cloud-mobile marketplace. It brings meaning and structure to overwhelming complexity, helping every company wield its vision as a strategic weapon.

How Category Design Works

Category design starts with identifying the problem that deserves to exist. You then craft a point of view (POV)—a story that defines the problem and convinces the world to demand a solution. Finally, you align your company’s product, culture, and messaging to make that story real. Ries and Trout once wrote that the first brand into the brain wins twice the market share of the next competitor. Category design systematizes that advantage: it deliberately engineers the mental slot your brand will occupy.

Core Principle

Position yourself—or be positioned. If you don’t control how the world defines your category, someone else will do it for you.

The Triangle of Design

A visual model anchors the system: the magic triangle of product design, company design, and category design. These three legs must be built together, just as Steve Jobs simultaneously designed Apple’s devices, its culture of obsessive simplicity, and its market categories. If one leg fails, the stool collapses. Great companies like Salesforce, VMware, and Google managed to achieve synchronicity—tying their category story to their product’s functionality and their organizational DNA.

Courage and Leadership

The discipline, however, is not for the fainthearted. Category design demands defiance of gravity: leaders must resist the urge to chase competitors or short-term improvements. They are betting on a market that does not yet exist. Elon Musk demonstrated the courage required when Tesla gave away its patents to accelerate adoption of electric vehicles. He understood that a thriving category—electric mobility—would strengthen the king’s position more than secrecy ever could. (Compare this to Henry Ford’s model of creating affordable automobiles, or Christensen’s ‘innovator’s dilemma,’ which warns that listening too much to current customers prevents breakthrough thinking.)

The Payoff

When mastered, category design becomes a growth engine. It creates a mental monopoly—the world doesn’t just buy your products; it buys your worldview. VMware’s early customers believed in the new idea of virtualization, not just the software itself. Salesforce’s “end of software” mantra conditioned an entire industry to reject old models. These companies didn’t wait for categories to appear—they built them, defined them, and crowned themselves kings.

For you as a leader or entrepreneur, category design is about deciding not to compete for market share but to create it. It’s the difference between improving a faster horse and inventing the automobile.

Every great category begins with a story—a point of view (POV) that reframes reality and ignites passion. The authors highlight that your POV is more than branding or marketing; it’s the narrative that conditions the market to see the world your way.

Storytelling Over Facts

Drawing on neuroscience research by Paul Zak, the book explains how stories trigger oxytocin, the empathy chemical that builds trust and memory. People recall emotions far better than data. That’s why Marc Benioff’s Salesforce didn’t sell software features—it told a story. His logo banned software altogether, declaring “The End of Software.” His POV wasn’t about being cheaper or faster; it was about liberating customers from outdated technology. The rally cry transformed Salesforce from obscure startup to market icon.

Structure of a Great POV

A compelling POV contains a simple emotional arc: the world has a problem, we see it differently, and here’s what happens when you join us. Think of it as your company’s Declaration of Independence. The message must evoke emotion—fear of missing out, excitement about what’s new, or relief from pain. The authors remind you to write like a human, not a corporate robot. Real words inspire real belief. When Apple introduced the iPad, Steve Jobs didn’t drown audiences in specs; he said the device created “a new category” that was “so much more intimate than a laptop.” Those phrases reframed what technology could mean.

Examples of Power in Practice

GoPro’s POV made cameras about you—your adventure, your story. Tesla’s made cars about the planet. Tableau’s made analytics visual and artistic. Each narrative defined not just a market but a mindset. Even Palm Computing’s early pivot illustrates this truth. Founder Jeff Hawkins reframed handheld computers as “connected organizers,” not mini-PCs, making Palm Pilot the first truly useful mobile device. His POV expressed simplicity over features, clarity over complexity—transforming a dying product into a phenomenon.

POV as Strategy

A point of view guides hiring, products, and investor relations. Amazon’s 1997 shareholder letter articulated its POV around bold, long-term growth—conditioning investors to expect reinvestment instead of immediate profits. Salesforce printed its POV on laminated cards for every employee. Pixar lived by “Story Is King.” In each case, the POV unified the organization so all decisions reinforced the same worldview. It defines not just what you sell but why you exist.

Think of your POV as an emotional blueprint for your category. A great one makes competitors seem irrelevant and customers feel part of a movement. Companies without one are doomed to compete on price and features. With it, you rally believers around a vision—and belief is the true currency of category kings.

Even the best POV needs momentum. That’s where mobilization and lightning strikes come in—tactical methods to turn strategy into reality. Category kings plan concentrated bursts of attention that unify employees, customers, and investors behind one powerful moment.

Fighting Gravity

Inside every company, there is a force the authors call gravity: the pull toward incremental improvements and safe bets. Gravity causes executives to chase short-term revenue instead of designing the future. The antidote is mobilization—the full alignment of organizational energy around the category vision. When Salesforce launched, Benioff marched his employees through protests against “software,” reminding them that the mission was ideological, not transactional.

What Is a Lightning Strike?

A lightning strike is an orchestrated event that captures market attention and anchors your category in the public mind. Think of Apple’s product unveilings, IBM’s 1964 System/360 launch, or Sensity’s strike at Lightfair International. These strikes act as shock-and-awe catalysts, forcing the world to notice the problem your category solves. They replace scattershot marketing (“peanut butter marketing”) with focused impact.

Sensity, a startup that created the category of Light Sensory Networks, hijacked a major industry conference by timing its launch around global news events. Within a week, its concept went from obscure to headline-making. That strike earned partnerships with Cisco and GE and $36 million in funding.

How to Mobilize Successfully

Mobilization demands discipline: the CEO must act as chief category officer. Teams build four documents—the category blueprint, product taxonomy, use cases, and ecosystem map. These tools clarify the market problem, the solution structure, and who plays what role. Together, they align product, marketing, and sales toward the lightning strike. The process surfaces weaknesses (“Is the suit too big?”) and reveals whether the vision fits the company’s capabilities—a concept borrowed from lean design thinking.

Overcoming Resistance

Gravity always strikes back. Some engineers protest, claiming “it can’t be done.” Sales teams blame messages for missed quotas. To overcome this, the CEO must inspire conviction and use deadlines as clarifying forces. “D-Day” thinking—a fixed date for the strike—creates urgency. The experience bonds teams and filters out doubters, or “Zeds,” those who sabotage belief from within.

Mobilization and lightning strikes transform words into action. They make the category visible, tangible, and irresistible. Once lightning hits, people can’t unsee it—and that is the moment a category becomes unstoppable.

After the lightning strike comes the flywheel—the self-reinforcing cycle that keeps category kings growing while competitors fade. This concept, borrowed from Jim Collins’s Good to Great, explains how every success compounds into more success, turning momentum into domination.

The Physics of the Flywheel

The flywheel spins only when three forces—company design, product design, and category design—move in perfect harmony. Execution fuels perception. As attention grows, more customers join, data accumulates, and the company becomes smarter, faster, and cheaper. This feedback loop makes dethroning a category king nearly impossible. Every attempt to imitate the king strengthens it instead.

Examples of Flywheel Kings

Facebook began as a Harvard dorm project. Through continuous expansion—from campus network to universal social graph—it multiplied its potential market a hundredfold. Each expansion reinforced its data supremacy and brand identity. Google followed the same path: search led to ads, to maps, to Gmail, to Android—each new service spun its information flywheel faster. Amazon’s retail flywheel and cloud flywheel (AWS) turned capital and customer data into infinite expansion. Starbucks became the “third place” of human connection, refining its culture as a lifestyle ecosystem.

Managing Category Potential

Eventually every category plateaus. Forward-thinking CEOs expand beyond their old boundaries to create new potential. Facebook moved from students to everyone on earth. Amazon moved from products to cloud services. VMware from virtualization to enterprise computing. This process, called continuous category creation, ensures perpetual relevance. CEOs who fail to expand—like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer—get trapped by gravity, milking old categories while missing new openings.

Harvesting vs. Creating

When your category matures, you face a choice: harvest profits or create anew. Legendary designers like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos chose creation; others, like Ballmer or Intel’s Craig Barrett, focused on harvesting. One strategy is not wrong—but confusing the two is fatal. The authors warn that if leaders pretend to be innovative while protecting old categories, they are merely “kidding themselves.”

The flywheel captures this paradox beautifully. Once it spins, growth feels inevitable—but only creators know when to add a new wheel. Continuous category design is not maintenance; it’s reinvention, the art of keeping your crown by redefining the kingdom itself.

Category kings can grow old—but they don’t have to die. The authors show how enduring companies institutionalize continuous category creation to stay relevant for decades. Corning, Apple, Amazon, and Google exemplify how to reinvent internal disciplines to design new markets repeatedly.

Corning: A 165-Year-Old Category Machine

Corning started as a glassmaker for Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs in 1851. By solving new problems—television tubes, Pyrex, fiber optics—the company kept creating categories of glass long after others burned out. When Steve Jobs sought the perfect scratchproof surface for the iPhone, Corning responded with Gorilla Glass, a product born of its century-long “grand challenge” to make glass unbreakable. The CEO Wendell Weeks framed Corning’s culture around problem-first thinking: “Fix what’s missing, not what’s better.”

Amazon and Google as Category Machines

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos institutionalized experimentation. AWS and Kindle emerged from different paths: one began with customer need, the other from internal skill repurposed for new customers. Both created billion-dollar categories that reinforced Amazon’s culture of bold innovation. Google followed suit with its Alphabet reorganization, separating mature businesses from experimental ones to prevent gravity from stifling category creation.

Breaking the “Kidding” Trap

Most large corporations claim they’re inventing new categories but are really “kidding”—dabbling in innovation while protecting old categories. SAP is the textbook case. Once the king of enterprise resource planning software, SAP announced cloud initiatives but refused to cannibalize its legacy business. Real category design demands bet-the-company commitment, not half measures.

The Play Bigger Guide

In their final chapter on corporate strategy, the authors list seven steps to institutionalize category creation: (1) involve everyone, (2) condition investors to expect innovation, (3) use time as advantage, (4) listen for different instead of better, (5) deploy category design internally, (6) stop kidding, and (7) manage a portfolio of categories. This blueprint turns big companies into perpetual startups.

Continuous category creation isn’t about chasing trends—it’s about mastering reinvention. As Amazon proves, daring to build new categories even during downturns keeps the flywheel spinning forever.

In its closing chapters, Play Bigger expands category thinking beyond business—to careers and personal growth. The message: you can be a category king of your own life.

Position Yourself—or Be Positioned

Dave Peterson’s early career epiphany captures the lesson. When he found his boss earning ten times his salary, the boss told him: “You can position yourself—or be positioned.” That moment sparked Peterson’s transformation from an overlooked employee to a marketing leader. Like companies, individuals must define their categories before others do it for them. Muhammad Ali invented the category of showman-boxer; George Lucas created the cinematic sci-fi visionary; Gandhi built “nonviolent revolutionary.” Each changed how others thought about their work.

Designing Your Triangle

Personal category design mirrors corporate design: define your self (who you are), your offering (what you uniquely do), and your environment (where you can best thrive). Aligning all three gives your career the stability of a three-legged stool. If you build your skills and POV simultaneously, opportunities will orbit you instead of the other way around.

Your Personal POV

Just as companies need a strong POV, so do people. Define your story: who you are, what problem you solve, and why that matters. Live it consistently until it conditions the “market” around you—your colleagues, network, or community—to see you as a category king. Larry Clark, the Iowa teacher who guided Peterson, or Harold Beam, the skate-shop master who taught Kevin Maney craftsmanship, both owned their niche completely. Their authenticity made them unforgettable.

Creating Personal Flywheels

Every success creates momentum for new opportunities. The authors urge readers to treat achievements as flywheel pushes—each reinforcing an enduring reputation. If you become the best local designer, expand your category. If you master writing, author a book that defines a genre. Categories scale when you keep reinventing yourself.

At its heart, playing bigger means living deliberately. You define your narrative, cultivate your distinct value, and shape the world’s perception of what you offer. Whether you’re founder, teacher, artist, or athlete, category is the new strategy for designing a legendary life.