📖 Playing to Win

How Strategy Really Works

2013. Roger L. Martin, & Alan G. Lafley

In 2017 Roger Martin was voted #1 on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s most influential management thinkers. A former Dean of the Rotman Business School, he has written several books of which this was his first bestseller.

His co-author here is A.G. Lafley who was chairman, president and CEO of Procter & Gamble. The pair collaborated together for many years in P&G while Martin worked there as part of Michael Porter’s consultancy firm Monitor. It so happens Monitor actually went bankrupt a few months before this book published, but—although Martin had spent 13 years there—he had left 5 years previous.

As Lafley climbed the ranks inside P&G, he continued working with Martin and this book is a collection of their success stories together from that period.

“This book is the story of that transformation [of P&G from 2000–2009] and the approach to strategy that defined it…Our intent is to provide you with a do-it-yourself guide to strategy”.

5 years on and Martin is still beating this drum, most recently here where just last month he was publishing articles about this “set of five choices that must be made”.

Considering Martin studied under Porter, and then worked in his firm for over a decade, it’s not surprising that his approach to strategy is very much informed by Porter, and what Mintzberg would call “the Positioning School”. He talks about strategy as “an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry”, and all in pursuit of another Porterism, “to create sustainable competitive advantage”.

His approach to strategy is also very deliberate. The lead team would get together, answer the 5 tough questions, and then off they go. There is no mention of any learning along the way that resulted in shifts to the original plan. Afterall, this is the man who called adaptive strategy a cop-out.

Olay

Although they reference many brands, the main success story in the book is Olay. Oil of Olay was an ageing brand losing relevancy which Martin and Lafley reignited to great success using their framework.

1. What is our winning aspiration?
   Market share leadership in North America, $1bn sales, and amongst market leaders globally.
2. Where will we play?
   Create a new segment between mass market brands and prestige brands. There was also references to picking markets, like “Asia made great sense [for baby care]—since for the foreseeable future, most of the worlds babies would be born in Asia”. Inspirational stuff.
3. How will we win where we have chosen to play?
   Better product. After all it was Porter who said companies just had to choose between being better or cheaper. “Formulate genuinely better skin-care products that could actually fight the signs of ageing. Wait, were they not doing that before AG?!
4. What capabilities must be in place to win?
   Innovation, packaging, distribution, marketing, “even business model innovation”.
5. What management systems are required to ensure the capabilities are in place?
   Talent strategy and retention initiatives, and customer feedback loops, among others.

Summary

As you may know by now from previous articles, I believe the best strategies emerge overtime as companies learn their way through problems. I’m more skeptical of approaches like the one advocated in this book where grand wizards (like a hot shot consultant, and a leading CEO) gather in a room, look at the market analysis, and declare a new strategy “to win”.

I’m also not a huge fan of all their militaristic metaphors, and the fact they talk about winning more than Trump and Charlie Sheen combined.

“A company must seek to win. If it doesn’t seek to win, it is wasting the time of it’s people”.

I gravitate more towards business leaders who don’t think the sole purpose of strategy and business is to defeat one’s rivals. I recently read an article by Joan Magretta in which she said “the performing arts provide a better analogy than war or sports. There can be many good singers or actors — each outstanding and successful in a distinctive way. Each finds and creates an audience. The more good performers there are, the more audiences grow and the arts flourish”.

All that aside, I agree with the core idea being put forward here which is that strategy is about choice. You make explicit trade-offs, which cascade and create clarity for everyone else in the organisation.

“It is natural to want to keep your options open as long as possible, rather than closing off possibilities by making explicit choices. But it is only through making and acting on choices that you can win. Yes, clear, tough choices force your hand and confine you to a path. But they also free you to focus on what matters

If I have succeeded in dissuading you from reading the book, you can watch Martin present the key takeaways here in just an hour or so.