Talk to Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
Playing to Win is Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's account of the strategy framework Lafley used to turn Procter and Gamble around as CEO from 2000 to 2009 and then again from 2013 to 2015. Martin is a strategy professor at the Rotman School of Management who worked closely with Lafley throughout. The book is built around a single deceptively simple claim: strategy is a set of integrated choices, not a plan or a vision or a set of aspirations.
The framework centers on five choices that form the strategic cascade: the Winning Aspiration (what does winning look like?), Where to Play (which markets, geographies, channels, customers?), How to Win (what is your competitive advantage in the places you've chosen?), What Capabilities are Required (what activities and systems must you have?), and What Management Systems support those capabilities? The choices are integrated — each one constrains and enables the others. A change in where to play requires recalibrating how to win, which requires different capabilities, which requires different management systems. The cascade must be coherent or it produces incoherence in execution.
What it gets right
- 1.
Strategy is an integrated set of five choices: Winning Aspiration, Where to Play, How to Win, Required Capabilities, and Management Systems. Each choice constrains and enables the others.
- 2.
Winning Aspiration is not a mission statement — it defines what success looks like in terms of customers, markets, and competitive position, not just internal goals.
- 3.
Where to Play must be explicit and specific. A company that tries to compete everywhere is not making a strategic choice — it is avoiding one.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Roger L. Martin is a professor emeritus at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where he served as dean from 1998 to 2013. He is the author of more than ten books on strategy and management, including The Design of Business, A New Way to Think, and When More Is Not Better. He has been listed among the top management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 multiple times. A.G. Lafley served as CEO of Procter and Gamble from 2000 to 2009 and again from 2013 to 2015, overseeing significant growth in brand equity and shareholder value during the first tenure.
