Although today Intel is a titan, the company's history has been a roller-coaster ride. And no one is more qualified to reflect on Intel's close calls and spectacular successes than its CEO, Andrew Grove. Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff say that Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive, offers advice to managers in every business on how to bridge the narrow line between catastrophe and opportunity, and seize the opportunities. Grove's leadership of Intel has led him to conclude that some fear is healthy, especially in organizations with a track record of success. His prescription for ending complacency is a dose of paranoia--a suspicion that the world is changing against you. How can managers catch this mental condition? By stepping outside their organization and adopting the perspective of someone without a vested interest in the status quo.

The essence of business success lies in making sure you're playing the right game. How do you know if it's the right game? What can you do if it's the wrong game? To help managers answer those questions, the authors have developed a framework that draws on the insights of game theory. The primary insight of game theory is the importance of focusing on others. In other words, companies should consider both cooperative and competitive ways to change the game. Who are the participants in the game of business? The authors introduce a schematic map that represents all the players and all the interdependencies among them.

Describes a problem of bankruptcy, following the treatment in the 2,000-year-old Babylonian Talmud. A person dies, leaving a number of debts that total more than the size of the estate. The question is: How should the estate be divided among the creditors? The case presents the Talmudic prescriptions for dividing three such estates. The estate division problem is then reinterpreted as the problem of how a number of partners involved in a project should divide the total cost of the project among them. The Talmudic prescription for estate division coincides with the added value approach. (In particular, it is neither equal nor proportional division.) The analysis applies beyond the context of estate division, as the cost-sharing reinterpretation demonstrates.