Positive Sum Thinking
QUOTE
An unknown person once said…
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
(African proverb)
CONCEPT
Positive Sum Thinking
Positive Sum Thinking is the belief that interactions, relationships, and deals don't have to produce a winner and a loser—that value can be created so that everyone walks away with more than they started with.
It's the alternative to zero-sum thinking, which assumes that any gain for one party is automatically a loss for another.
The shift in mindset is profound. Zero-sum thinkers protect, hoard, and maneuver. Positive sum thinkers build, share, and expand.
STORY
Rivals … in Partnership?
In 1983, Apple and Microsoft were not yet enemies. They were, in a carefully constructed arrangement, something far more interesting: reluctant partners who were about to make each other extraordinarily powerful—even if only one of them fully understood it at the time.
Steve Jobs had invited Bill Gates and a small team of Microsoft developers to Apple's Cupertino campus to build software for the Macintosh, which was still a year from launch. Jobs believed he was extracting value from Microsoft—getting crucial applications built for his revolutionary new machine. Gates believed something similar.
Both men thought they were winning.
Microsoft spent nearly two years working intimately inside Apple's ecosystem, studying the graphical user interface that Jobs had famously drawn inspiration from during a visit to Xerox PARC. When Windows 1.0 launched in 1985, the resemblance to the Macintosh interface was unmistakable. Apple sued. Jobs felt betrayed.
But zoom out, and the full picture is more complicated—and more instructive.
The collaboration produced Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel for the Macintosh, applications that made the Mac a serious business machine and helped establish Apple as more than a hobbyist computer company. Without those applications, the Mac's launch might have been considerably less impactful. Meanwhile, the exposure to Apple's interface philosophy accelerated Microsoft's development of Windows, which eventually ran on hundreds of millions of machines worldwide.
Together, the two companies didn't just grow their own businesses—they helped create the modern personal computing industry.
By the mid-1990s, the global PC market had exploded from a niche product into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry that neither company could have built alone.
The irony is that Jobs and Gates each entered the arrangement thinking like zero-sum players—each convinced he was extracting more than he was giving. But the outcome was spectacularly positive sum.
The board didn't just produce a winner. It got bigger.