Owned Network

Trust is the belief that you’ll act in a reliable and dependable way. It is earned over time through consistent behavior and actions.

Do you have built a reputation for being trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term thinkers in an otherwise trust-deficit ecosystem?

Even after you Buy your way in, always give more than you take from a Owned Network.

• Be present: It could be something as simple as not carrying on a conversation with yourself in your head. Instead, be there fully, listen, and care about the people you are speaking to and focus on their interests.
• Provide value to the conversation by teaching, giving a compliment, making a funny comment, or telling a story.
• Finally, be high status and don’t seek approval.

Build multiple exit and entry options even before the event happens.

Why it matters: Without leverage, you’ll be left without options, making you susceptible to extractive leadership and isolation because powerlessness corrupts.. If you don’t accept, your only other option is to exit the game.

How: Candid Communication gives you an opportunity to meet new people and through them new trends and opportunities. This leads to information asymmetry which is key for building optionality.

Give something of value to enter a closed Owned Network or Community of people.

The only way for us to move forward is to encourage and amplify the work of people in your Owned Network who are willing to learn, to see and to commit to making things better.

In zero-sum games, for someone to win another has to lose.

Why it matters: It is important to identify zero-sum games and avoid them because the resulting drama distract us from what matters strategically.

• It makes us hallucinate opportunities where none exist.
• It takes significant time to play status-games because status needs to be known, signaled, and maintained.
• Those who play zero-sum games don’t attract opportunities from long-term players.
• In zero-sum industries, prestige is given much higher weightage than merit.

In contrast: Be on the look out for and play Positive-sum Games.

What causes it: Zero-sum games are triggered by scarcity, conformity, and status-seeking.

• Competition happens when it isn’t feasible to create net-new things and there is isn’t enough money (store of value) to go around. This happens in industries like real-estate, etc.
• In some industries, success is rewarded with status instead of money (store of value), for example, in academia, news and media, identity politics, managers in a dysfunctional organization, etc. In such situations, signaling becomes a better means for advancement than actually doing the work. In contrast, incumbents play the role of gate-keepers.
• A rookie in a cricket team doesn’t resent a pro. However, when hierarchies are built without any meaningful criteria and merit, it degenerates into a zero-sum game. For a number 2 to be number 1, the number 1 must be brought down.

To break free from zero-sum games:

• Think and act independently. Don’t conform.
• Think in Building Blocks
• Build on what you’ve got.

Unlike Zero-sum game, positive-sum games can have multiple winners. For example, everyone can build leverages like Capital, Health, Labor, Judgment, etc. that eventually lead to Competitive Differentiation. You win by being better at what you do.