Coming soon · Book Profile
Playing to Win How Strategy Really Works
Two seasoned strategists reveal that winning in business is not about visions or plans, but about making a rigorous and integrated set of five choices that define where to play and how to win in the marketplace.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
In 'Playing to Win,' former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley and strategy advisor Roger L. Martin demystify strategy, transforming it from a high-concept, abstract exercise into a practical, repeatable playbook for success. Drawing on their decades of experience, most notably the stunning turnaround of P&G, the authors argue that the heart of strategy is a series of five integrated choices: What is your winning aspiration? Where will you play? How will you win? What capabilities must be in place? And what management systems are required? Through compelling, behind-the-scenes stories of iconic brands like Olay, Tide, and Gillette, they illustrate how this 'choice cascade' can be applied at any level of an organization to create sustainable competitive advantage. This book is an essential do-it-yourself guide for any leader who wants to stop just competing and start winning.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A business leader, manager, or strategist who is responsible for the performance of their organization, division, or team. They want to create a clear strategy that delivers superior results and allows them to win in their market, but they are often stuck with ineffective processes and mediocre outcomes.
- The problem
- Their organization lacks a clear, coherent, and actionable strategy, leading to unfocused efforts, wasted resources, and being consistently outmaneuvered by more strategic competitors. They feel frustrated by the ambiguity and complexity of strategy, overwhelmed by 'corporate theater' planning reviews, and uncertain about how to make the tough choices necessary for success.
- The plan
- Answer the five questions of the Strategic Choice Cascade to define your strategy on a single page.
- Use the Strategy Logic Flow framework to analyze your industry, customers, relative position, and competition.
- Apply the 'Reverse Engineering' process to rigorously test your strategic possibilities and make a robust choice.
- The payoff
- You become a confident and capable strategist who leads your team to make clear, tough, and winning choices. · Your organization has a powerful, integrated strategy that everyone understands and can execute against. · You create sustainable competitive advantage, win with consumers, and deliver superior value and financial returns.
See our guide
Related profiles we’ve built
- Competitive Strategy →
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant →
- An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization →
- Apa Handbook Io V2 →
- Applied Psychology in Human Resource Management →
- Armstrong’s Handbook of Strategic Human Resource Management →
- Beyond Hr Boudreau Ramstad →
- Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition (Collins Business Essentials) →
Additional reading
- Competitive Strategy · Michael Porter
The book is cited as the source for the concept of a 'focus' strategy, which is analyzed in detail using the Crown Cork & Seal case. Porter's Five Forces framework is also mentioned as a tool for industry analysis.
- Only the Paranoid Survive · Andrew Grove
The author discusses Grove's concept of 'inflection points' as a way of understanding major industry transitions, specifically in the context of the computer industry's shift from a 'vertical' to a 'horizontal' structure.
- The Fifth Discipline · Peter Senge
The book is discussed and critiqued as part of the intellectual lineage that can lead to bad strategy, particularly its emphasis on 'shared vision,' which the author links to the quasi-religious 'New Thought' movement.
- Thoughts Are Things · Prentice Mulford
Cited as a foundational text of the 'New Thought' movement, which the author argues is a dangerous intellectual precursor to modern bad strategy that substitutes positive thinking for rigorous analysis.
- The Concept of Corporate Strategy · Kenneth R. Andrews
The book explicitly positions itself as building on the 'classic approach to strategy formulation' heavily influenced by Andrews' work at Harvard, which focused on matching company strengths and weaknesses to environmental opportunities and threats.
- Business Policy: Text and Cases · C. Roland Christensen, Kenneth R. Andrews, and Joseph L. Bower
Cited along with Andrews' work as a standard-setter in the field of strategy formulation that provided the intellectual starting point for the more analytical frameworks developed in this book.
- The Strategy of Conflict · Thomas Schelling
The concepts in Chapter 5 on Competitive Moves, such as commitment, threats, and focal points, are direct applications of Schelling's seminal game theory work to business competition.
- Interbrand Choice, Strategy and Bilateral Market Power · Michael E. Porter
This is the author's own prior academic work, and the preface notes that the research journey for 'Competitive Strategy' began with his doctoral dissertation and subsequent research in industrial organization, which this book represents.
- Co-opetition · A. Brandenburger and B. Nalebuff
In the 1998 introduction, Porter cites this book as the single most important contribution to extending his ideas, particularly regarding the cooperative enhancement of total value with buyers, suppliers, and producers of complements.
- Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy · Joseph A. Schumpeter
The book's concept of value innovation creating new markets is compared to Schumpeter's idea of 'creative destruction,' but the authors distinguish Blue Ocean Strategy by emphasizing that it can also be about 'nondestructive creation,' where a new market doesn't necessarily displace an old one.