Thinking books · Strategy & competition · A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin, 2013
Playing to Win — the big ideas
Strategy as five linked choices, from the people who ran it at Procter & Gamble.
Free — no account needed to read
The big ideas
The five: what is our winning aspiration, where will we play, how will we win, what capabilities are required, what management systems are needed. They have to be consistent with each other.
Where to play and how to win are the two that matter and the two most often skipped in favour of aspiration.
Strategy is choice, and choice means not doing things. A strategy everyone likes is usually one that excludes nothing.
Its reverse-engineering method — asking what would have to be true for each option to be right — turns argument into investigation.
Practise it — no need to have read it
For a choice you face, write for each option: what would have to be true for this to be the right one?
A hint: Then go and find out which of those is actually true, instead of debating preferences.
Where it shows up in real life
- Business strategy
- Career choices
- Team disagreement about direction
Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.
Thinking methods from this book
- Diagnosis, policy, action — The three parts a real strategy has, and whose absence makes one a list of hopes.
The thinking it builds
- Strategic Thinking — Think beyond the immediate next step
- Decision Thinking — Make better decisions under uncertainty