Book Review- Playing to Win by Lafley Martin

This weeks read was Playing to Win by Lafley Martin. It is an in-depth look at strategic best practices, heavily informed by P&G. It spends a lot of time in storytelling with examples from the company's portfolio of products, their management practices around strategy, and a simplistic high level framework of good strategy. Here is your rapid summary:

A good strategy is the set of choices you make and don't make, but they must all answer these key questions. What is your winning aspiration? Where in the market will you play? How will you win? What core capabilities set you apart? How will you manage the continuous monitoring of your strategy, the focus it provides, and the need to pivot when conditions change? Now that you know what you are after, let's look at how you get there.

If you have a problem, step 1 is to frame it as a choice. It's not a strategy if isn't born of options. Step 2 is to brainstorm additional strategic options. Step 3 is to decide what would need to be true for each choice to be the most terrific option. Step 4 is to figure out what will prevent those ideal contexts from arising. Step 5 is to design tests to figure out, which set of contexts you find your business to be in right now. Step 6, do the test. Now, armed with the best info, choose your strategy.

Now that you have a strategy, you go to the highest level of your organization where below you, strategy is likely to be similar. Then you identify the cluster of unique core capabilities that when working together properly, give you the competitive edge. You then cascade down the organization, with each level focused on maximizing the value it can provide to the level below, specifically as it relates to that core set of capabilities, your unique business differentiators. Good strategy creates cascading focus, not grabbing at each opportunity.

Lastly, now you have a strategy that works through the organization, you have to manage it. I will be honest, the book lost me here. It talked a lot about executive meeting practices, metrics, one pagers, and culture of non-confrontational discussion. I think what it meant to say is some combination of: You get what you measure. Fact is better than theory. Situations constantly change and good strategy pivots. Good strategy is constantly recommunicated. You got to have a culture that has real discussions about the future and not defensive stances about the present. And for all that is holy, do not forget that your competitor is not standing still, but will respond to you.

All in all, it is a good book, but the target audience is a large business VP+, a product strategist, or planner, and maybe a Sr. Director in marketing. I wish it had more models and less story, so that it could be more broadly generalized by corporate consultants, but I will take the wisdom I can get.