When we were kids, my brother and I would practice being little capitalists by trying to extort the maximum profit out of a game of Monopoly. We each had our own strategies and sometimes I would win. More often I was left high and dry, with bills to pay for repairs and maintenance on properties which brought me little or no return. David would be stuffing the cash into his bank account, whereas the proverbial moth would flutter out of mine…
I always put this imbalance down to our age difference, David being 2 1/2 years older than me and wise and wiley in his ways. I think that it was smilingly said that boys were naturals at monopoly and it wasn’t really a game for girls. So, I accepted my losses as being just and played none the less, always with the same strategy:
Buy the houses both sides of GO – Mayfair and Parklane to one side and Old Kent Road and Whitechapel Road to the other. My logic? Because we were all heading fo GO to collect our cash (wages), the chances were very high that a player would have to stop either side of it.
I recently played Monopoly again (the Disney variety, one of six (!) available these days) and I found myself buying the same spots, although no longer called Mayfair or Old Kent Road, but rather The Lion King and The Rescuers …. As I found myself at the losing end of a sassy eight year old’s winning strategy, I got to thinking…
I know, you could call me slow, exceedingly so, but at last the penny dropped.
Players aren’t heading for GO, they have to pass it on their way to buy and develop other properties. At last it dawned on me: My whole strategy was based on a faulty assumption that the odds of a player landing on my properties was higher than anywhere else on the board at any other time.
WOW! What a revelation! It certainly explains why I lost so frequently.
Years have passed and now I understand the significance of our strategies. Where my brother was building houses, converting them into hotels and creating pockets of DavidDom for me to have to pass through along all fours sides of the board, I was creating Janeville in only one place! I was dishing out gallons of cash to stay in the game, vainly hoping that ODDS would bring him to my territory – four measely properties, often overloaded with houses, hotels and other edifices of my imagining (and all spotlessly clean, in the way that a woman should keep house, so I was told).
I’m not sure how I arrived at my assumption or how I decided upon my strategy then, and I don’t rule out having been suckered by some friendly big brotherly advise, but what astounds me now is how my approach to business today has been shaped by our games then.
I’ve been through a tough business year. I think many of us have and I took the opportunity to observe what I was doing, thinking and believing about myself in my business to see what I could do to help myself.
I noticed that I tended to “hedge”, play safe and partake in likely opportunities. Ones that customers are most likely to get drawn to, like bees to a honey pot (Winnie-the-Pooh on my daughters’ Monopoly board). Sound familiar?
I also noticed that I felt a strong resentment towards others who were smarter at developing their businesses than I was: through clever marketing or expansion. In my mind I kept ahold of my little empire and painted it in proud colours and shining rooftops, all to attract the ODDS that someone would land on my space. Whoops…
And then the clincher: as long as I could collect my 200 to stay in the game, I would keep playing. Where that 200 was life blood for me, it was pocket-money for the (plastic) cigar smoking, Cheshire cat grinning, big brother opposite me. My attitudes to money today accurately reflect the panic which I used to experience whilst staring at an empty bank and a pile of bills and a demoniacally laughing big brother (bless him). Utterly helpless about sums it up.
So what have I (finally) learnt from Monopoly?
1) Check your assumptions!
2)Focus is good, but limiting yourself to one side of the game isn’t a winning strategy.
3) There is money to be made by developing your prospects in the wider sense, much more than by picking up the crumbs on the way round.
4) Spread your risk and increase the odds of being landed on, by playing the whole board (increase your exposure).
6) Girls can play business just as well as boys and NEVER take strategic advice from your opponent!*
More faulty logic...
*By this I don’t refute the value of advice given by a competitor. Syntax people!
