Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life

Barry Nalebuff teaches business management at Yale. He consults for major businesses and writes articles for national periodicals; his six books have 400,000 copies in print, and his online lectures on negotiation at Coursera are the second-most recommended. Nalebuff earned degrees from MIT and used his Rhodes Scholarship to earn a PhD at Oxford. 

University of Maryland public policy professor Thomas Schelling shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work that expanded game theory to include nuclear war strategy. He’s famous for his concept of brinkmanship, the act of dragging opponents to the edge of disaster to force them to make concessions, a principle widely understood among nations with nuclear weapons. He’s also known for Schelling Points—locations, or focal points, where people find each other without agreeing to beforehand—and he did significant work on racial balance in neighborhoods. Schelling receives credit numerous times in Thinking Strategically for his many contributions to game theory.

Mathematician John von Neumann, born in Hungary in 1903, learned calculus at age eight, emigrated to the US in the 1930s, and later helped develop the atomic bomb for American forces during World War II. He also invented the Cold War game strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, a form of brinkmanship meant to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. Widely considered one of the all-time greatest math geniuses, von Neumann’s work on computer theory helped launch the computer age, and his work on game theory formalized the field as a scientific study. 

Princeton mathematics researcher John Nash (PhD) received the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for his development of the concept of equilibria in game theory, now called Nash equilibria, which proved that finite zero-sum games of mixed strategy always contain an equilibrium point on which the players settle. He also made major contributions in other areas of math. Nash, who had schizophrenia, is the subject of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Life.