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Follow The Leader By Daniel Gross
Nonetheless, for 120 years, one board-game company – Parker Brothers – has managed to make market leadership look like child’s play. And at the center of Parker Brothers’ unlikely story, told by former executive Philip E. Orbanes in The Game Makers (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), lies several crucial insights on the business of games, and on the game of business. In 1883, George Parker, who lived near Boston, modified a simple card game to make a game he called “Banking.” When big-city publishers turned down his ideas, he printed up 500 copies and sold Banking out of a suitcase. In the 1880s, as Orbanes noted, Parker “came to see a relationship between the strategies that guided success in parlor games and the principles that enhanced success in the ‘game’ of business.” In fact, he codified them in 12 rules, many of which sound as if they were ripped from present-day management tomes: “Know your goal and reach for it;” and “When faced with a choice, make the move with the most potential benefit versus risk.” Parker Brothers’ largest and most lasting breakthrough came with another business-oriented game. In 1934, when the company’s sales had fallen by two-thirds from the 1929 level, George Parker was offered the opportunity to purchase a game in which players could amass riches by trading properties and railroads, and by building hotels and houses. Parker politely passed. But after its inventor, failed plumbing salesman Charles Brace Darrow, published Monopoly himself and it caught on, Parker Brothers was offered a second chance. The company acquired Monopoly, and launched it nationwide during the 1935 Christmas shopping season. It became an instant hit, selling 250,000 units. George Parker, then in his late 60s, turned to one of his youthful rules: “Bet heavily when the odds are long in your favor.” Parker in 1936 developed six different editions of the game, ranging in price from $2 to $25. In 1936, 1.81 million copies were sold. George Parker died in 1952 at the age of 86. In the post-war years, Parker Brothers introduced a succession of smash hits: Risk, Careers, and Trivial Pursuit. The company, now a unit of Hasbro, has maintained its leadership by adhering to Parker’s simple rules about business – and games. The most universal, perhaps, is Rule No. 4: “Learn from failure; build upon success.” Daniel Gross is editor of Sternbusiness.
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enerally speaking,
children’s games
aren’t seen as having much bearing on the business world. Sure,
most companies would like to play Follow the Leader, or King of the
Mountain, or Capture the Flag. But as any management consultant worth
his hourly fee will tell you, business is never that simple.