Playing to Win

A.G. Lafley ran Procter & Gamble as CEO, and Roger L. Martin, then dean of the Rotman School of Management, advised him on strategy. Playing to Win sets out the method they used at P&G, where strategy is an integrated set of choices that puts the company in a position to win. The book frames those choices as a cascade of five questions: what is our winning aspiration, where will we play, how will we win, what capabilities must we have, and what management systems do we need.

We use the book’s cascade as the standard check on whether a strategy is a strategy at all. It pairs with Rumelt’s kernel from Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Rumelt asks what the obstacle is. Lafley and Martin ask what you have chosen. See Strategy Cascade for how we apply it, and iterative strategy development for how we test the choices.

Resources

• A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, “Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)
• Strategy Cascade — the five linked choices from the book
• Iterative Strategy Development — how we test the cascade’s choices in cycles