Most strategy advice tells you how to play better: sharper pricing, faster service, harder hustle. Game theory’s deeper gift is the reminder that the game itself is not fixed. Brandenburger and Nalebuff distilled it into five levers, PARTS: change the Players, change the Added values, change the Rules, change the Tactics (what players perceive), or change the Scope (which games are linked) (1)(2). A founder losing a game as given can often redesign it instead of grinding inside it, and the redesigns are usually cheaper than the grind. The trader who recruits a new wholesaler has changed Players. The growers’ group that grades its produce has changed Added values. The association that wins a standard has changed Rules. This essay walks the five levers with East African cases, because the operators with the least power inside today’s games have the most to gain from redesigning them.
Key Takeaways
- Games are not weather. Players, added values, rules, perceptions, and boundaries can all be changed deliberately, and changing them is strategy’s highest-leverage work (1)(2).
- P, Players: who is in the game determines its shape. Bringing in a new supplier, buyer, complementor, or even competitor can improve your position more than any move inside the current lineup.
- A, Added values: raise yours or lower others’ dominance. Differentiation, group brands, and complements redesign the distribution of power.
- R, Rules: standards, contracts, licensing, and policy set what moves exist. Small firms change rules through associations; the tariff petition can beat the price war.
- T, Tactics: games run on perceptions. Signaling commitment, credibility, and information changes how others play without changing anything material.
- S, Scope: no game is an island. Linking or delinking games, bundling markets, entering a rival’s stronghold to relieve pressure in yours, redraws the board itself.
Why is changing the game higher leverage than playing it?
Because inside a given game, your ceiling is your added value, and grinding raises it slowly; redesigning the game can move the ceiling overnight. The added-value essay showed why twenty identical tomato stalls each capture nothing: the game as constituted assigns them no power. No amount of harder playing fixes that. Changing the players (a new institutional buyer), the added values (a graded group brand), or the rules (a market authority quality standard) fixes it structurally, and those moves cost organization more than money, which is exactly the currency thin-margin firms have.
The levers also compound. When Kenya’s mobile operators finally connected their rails, that single Rules-and-Players change re-priced every participant’s added value and grew the sector into a $1.4 trillion floor (4)(5). When rivals co-build infrastructure under the five green lights, they are pulling the P and S levers together: new shared player (the rail), wider scope (everyone’s customers reachable). PARTS is the grammar beneath every case this series has examined; what follows is each lever in the operator’s hand.
What do the five levers look like in practice?
Players. Every game is defined by who sits at the table: customers, suppliers, competitors, complementors. The cheapest redesign is often recruitment. One new wholesaler breaks a supplier’s monopoly pricing before a single negotiation happens, because the threat of the alternative does the negotiating. One anchor buyer, a school, a hospital, an exporter, transforms a producer’s game from spot-market scramble to contracted volume. Sometimes the player to add is a competitor: a second solar firm in the district validates the category your lone evangelism could not, the pie logic in action. And sometimes the move is paying to bring in a complementor, financing the cold-storage operator or the delivery rider whose presence makes your product sellable, the Value Net used as a recruitment map.
Added values. Raise yours: differentiation, reliability, bundled advice, trust. Lower the dominance of others’: second-source every critical input, standardize what a powerful buyer tried to make proprietary, join the group whose collective brand out-negotiates any member’s solo weight. Power in games is relative; both directions of the lever move you up.
Rules. Rules decide which moves exist: payment terms, quality standards, licensing fences, tender specifications, tax treatment. Large firms lobby; small firms change rules through numbers. The association that persuades the market authority to enforce grading has outlawed the race to the bottom. The sector group that wins a tariff reclassification has done what no member’s price war could. Faith networks hold underused rule-power here: a fellowship of Christian business owners agreeing on same-day wage payment or honest-invoice standards is writing private rules that change the game for everyone who trades with them.
Tactics. Games run on what players believe. Signals, commitments, and information are moves: the published price list that commits you credibly, the long-term lease that tells rivals you are not leaving, the transparent audit that de-escalates a trust war. Perception moves are the cheapest lever and the most abused; the operator of faith uses them to clarify truth, never to manufacture falsehood, which is itself a signal the market eventually prices.
Scope. No game is an island; boundaries are choices. Bundle games: the input seller who adds crop-purchase guarantees has linked planting-season and harvest-season games so each secures the other. Delink them: sell the loss-making delivery arm so its game stops taxing yours. Or widen deliberately: enter a rival’s stronghold not to win it but to give them a front to defend, relieving pressure in your home market. Scope is the master lever because it decides which pies are even on the table, and the floor-and-ceiling doctrine is ultimately a scope discipline: choosing which layer of the market to treat as one shared game and which to keep contested.
How does an operator use PARTS without a strategy department?
Quarterly, with one page. Write the game you most wish were different: the supplier squeeze, the commodity trap, the tender you always lose. Then five lines, one per lever, answering a single question each. Who could I add or help exit? What would raise my added value or dilute the dominant player’s? Which rule, if changed, would change everything, and who could change it with me? What do the other players currently believe that is wrong, and what honest signal corrects it? What game could I link to this one, or cut loose from it?
Most quarters, one lever will glow. It is usually not the one you have been grinding. Founders default to Tactics inside the given game, working harder, shaving prices, because those moves need no one’s cooperation. The heavier levers, Players, Rules, Scope, usually require allies, which is why this series keeps returning to co-opetition: the games most worth redesigning are redesigned by coalitions. The operator who learns to see the board this way stops asking only “how do we win this game?” and starts asking the question that built every good market East Africa has: “what game should we be playing, and who builds it with us?”
FAQ
What is the PARTS framework?
Brandenburger and Nalebuff’s five levers for changing a game rather than just playing it: Players, Added values, Rules, Tactics (perceptions), and Scope (which games are linked). Each lever redesigns the strategic situation itself.
How can a small firm change the players in its game?
By recruitment: sourcing a second supplier to break monopoly pricing, landing an anchor buyer, financing a missing complementor, or even welcoming a competitor whose presence validates a young category.
How do small firms change rules?
Through numbers: associations that win quality standards, grading enforcement, tariff reclassifications, or tender specifications. Private rule-making also counts, as when business fellowships adopt shared standards for wages or invoicing.
What is the scope lever?
The choice of which games are connected. Bundling linked seasons or markets, delinking a draining side-game, or opening a front in a rival’s stronghold all redraw the board rather than playing harder on the existing one.
How often should PARTS be reviewed?
Quarterly, one page: the game you most want changed, then one line per lever. Most quarters a single lever offers the structural move that months of harder play could not.
Related Reading
- The Pie Is the Point: Value Creation vs Value Capture
- Added Value Is the Real Currency
- The Value Net: Your Competitor Is Only One of Four Players
- The Five Green Lights for Partnering With a Competitor
Sources and Evidence
- Brandenburger and Nalebuff, “The Right Game: Use Game Theory to Shape Strategy,” Harvard Business Review (1995): the PARTS levers presented with cases.
- Co-opetition (Brandenburger and Nalebuff, 1996), overview: the framework’s full development.
- Airline alliances, overview: players and scope levers at industry scale.
- GSMA, “Understanding mobile money interoperability”: a rules-and-players redesign that grew the whole sector.
- GSMA, “Maturing global mobile money market hits $1.4tn in transaction value”: the redesigned game’s scale.