Playing games for real

摘要

Game Theory highlights that the actions of all the 'Players' in an industry, i.e. your suppliers, competitors, allies and regulators, will have an impact on the effectiveness of your own actions and your resultant fortunes. The actions open to a player will depend very much on what they are able to do. Hence it is interesting to consider the capabilities of your own organisation and visualise how these capabilities compare to those of the other players - areas of interest include the scope of activities performed, reputation and the availability of resources of various types, including human, financial, physical and intellectual. Capability Mapping is a methodology for visualising this and consists of the following steps: 1. deconstruct the offering into a 'Value Chain' - i.e. the series of activities needed to satisfy the needs of the customer; 2. identify those resources which are helpful in comparing the players - such as reputation and knowledge of territories or technologies; 3. identify the players in the market - including subcontractors to the major players; 4. capture the above details on a spreadsheet; 5. rate the extent to which each Player possesses the capabilities required to serve the market and has access to appropriate resources; 6. using a coloured key for each level is help in visualising the overall relative positions - transforming a table into a Map; 7. basic financial and corporate data, e.g. headcount / turnover / profitability etc. can add to the picture or provide evidence to support some of the other ratings given.