Name: Playing to Win
ISBN: 9781422187395

Roger L. Martin

Alan G. Lafley

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

How Strategy Really Works

Playing to Win

Cristian Garcia

I’m always in for a good business book, specially when one of the protagonists was your professor. Filippo Passerini was one of the main executives for P&G. He lead the M&A with Gillette and brought new IT capabilities to the company. During the classes at the MBA, he used to talk about this VUCA world (vulnerable, unpredictable, chaotic and ambiguous). Several times he talked about Playing to Win and he told us this book was a longer version of his classes; that´s why I picked it up, 2 years after graduating, but as hungry as usual.

Playing to win discusses the way P&G and its brands approach strategy. And what’s unique about them? Well, the title says it all.
The strategy logic flow
The strategy logic flow

P&G has 5 questions or areas when it comes to clarify the way to move forward

What is our winning aspiration? Determine a particular place and a determined way to win. And winning is translated about clear statements about an ideal future. Where will we play? This are the sets of choices that narrow your competitive field. In which market, to which customers, through which channels, in which product categories and at which vertical stage. How will we win where we have chosen to play? What will enable the company to create unique value to customers in a way that is distinct from competition. What capabilities must be in place to win? (1) What core capabilities must be in place to win; range and quality and activities that will enable company to win (2) what management systems are required to support this strategic choices?; And what are core capabilities? (a) Deep consumer understanding (b) Innovation (c ) Brand Building (d) Go-to-Market ability (e) Global scale What management systems are required to ensure the capabilities are in place? Foster, support and measure the strategy.

Each category has depth and several layers. Is not as easy as it seems. Moreover, the network the company has is complex and simple at the same time.

At the heart of this network, there’s consumer understanding, brand building, innovation, go-to-market capabilities and scale. All of them make a lot of sense when you are P&G, but also they make sense when you are a small company just trying to meet each month.

So, what´s important about where to play and how to win? What should be the framework?

The industry, attractiveness of segments. Customers, what do they value? Relative position, how does your company fare regarding competition? Competition, what competition will do once you have chosen your course of action
Filippo Passerini
Filippo Passerini

THE STRATEGY LOGIC FLOW

First you need to understand the industry attractiveness, this means segmentation and how attractive is each segment.

Then we move to customer value analysis: whether it is as a cost leader or differentiator, the company needs to understand what the customer values. Once we have a deep understanding of our customer we need to capture our relative position. What capabilities do we have in house and most importantly, how our costs looks like? Now we go to Competitors analysis, is all about anticipating competitors reactions once we have started our strategy deployment. Last but not least, our strategic choice. At some point, the book states that a big part of a strategy is about saying “no” and this last part is all about where to play and how to win.

The book closes with many questions (my favorite sort of book, open for you to sort it).

Have you define winning and your winning inspirations?
Have you decided where can you play to win?
Have you determined how will you win?
Have you built your core capabilities to compete?
Do your management systems and KPI´s are ready to support the precious 4 pillars?

Ron Bronson

If you were with us for the first post in the #28DaysSolo series, I mentioned one of the goals of this project is to complete a book a week.  This week’s entry is the newly released book by A.G. Lafley, the former chairman and CEO of Proctor & Gamble and Roger Martin, give us this outstanding look at strategy from the trenches called Playing To Win: How Strategy Really Works.

Akin to James C. Collins Good To Great, Playing To Win is a business book you can apply to any industry. It’s got juicy morsels that can help with whatever project you’re up to at any time. While many of the examples in Playing To Win revolve around the dramatic changes Lafley initiated while at P&G, each chapter comes with takeaways that help you synthesize everything you’ve read.

To that end, it’s not the kind of book I’d consider light dinner reading. But it’s well-written, chock full of strategic inspiration and breaks down what strategy is and what strategy isn’t. It does this better than any book I’ve read in a long time, and I’ve added it to the list of books I call “arsenal books” – ones I refer to and reflect on at critical junctures in my professional life.

Even if your day-to-day responsibilities don’t deal directly with strategy, Playing To Win will give you a greater appreciation for the business world and the kinds of decisions that get made in the C-suites and offices before they reach the floor where we consume these products. While it might seem strange to consider a business book when you work in non-profit higher education, it’s my opinion that many of the lessons in the book relate well regardless of the field you work in. The more you read, the more you start to figure out how the strategic lessons in the book can apply to all sorts of things.

If you’re interested in honing your strategic strength, I encourage you to check out Playing To Win.

Lance Willett

After second reading this book went from 3 to 4 stars. For deepening my vocabulary (VUCA) and for clearly calling out common mistakes.

Vocabulary check: "VUCA" is the state of the world. Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

- Ambiguous is open to several meanings; more than one.
- Vague is unclear, lacks detail, a single meaning.
- Uncertain is not fixed, not precise, unknown or zero meanings.

Connect to customers and workers on deeper meaning of what you do. 

Aspirations are not strategy. *Dreams trap.*
If everything is a priority, nothing is. *Waterloo trap.*

In summary: "Strategy should be a process, not a result."

Playing to Win How Strategy Really Works