Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works Author: A.G. Lafley | Language: English | ISBN:
B00AJVJ1HI | Format: EPUB
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works Description
This is A.G. Lafley’s guidebook. Shouldn’t it be yours as well?
Winning CEO A.G. Lafley is now back at the helm of consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. If you want to know the strategy he’ll use to restore P&G to its former dominance—read this book.
Playing to Win, a noted Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, outlines the strategic approach Lafley, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, used to double P&G’s sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion when Lafley was first CEO (he led the company from 2000 to 2009). The book shows leaders in any type of organization how to guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success—where to play and how to win.
Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors. They are: (1) What is our winning aspiration? (2) Where will we play? (3) How will we win? (4) What capabilities must we have in place to win? and (5) What management systems are required to support our choices? The result is a playbook for winning.
The stories of how P&G repeatedly won by applying this method to iconic brands such as Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze clearly illustrate how deciding on a strategic approach—and then making the right choices to support it—makes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning.
Playing to Win outlines a proven method that has worked for some of today’s most celebrated brands and products. Let this book serve as your new guide to winning, as well.
- File Size: 2365 KB
- Print Length: 272 pages
- Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (February 5, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00AJVJ1HI
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,891 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Management > Strategic Management - #17
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Systems & Planning - #26
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Organizational Behavior
- #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Management > Strategic Management - #17
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Systems & Planning - #26
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Organizational Behavior
The content of this book focuses on the transformation of Procter & Gamble (P&G) between 2000 and 2009, and discusses the approach to strategy that led to this transformation, leading to a doubling of sales, a quadrupling of profits, and an increased share price of more than 80 percent during that decade. The authors discuss that although many good strategic choices were made, the company also had its share of disappointments and failures. And most importantly, "no strategy lasts forever".
In my recent review of "Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (Second Edition)", by Kees van der Heijden, I mentioned that one of the best takeaways from what the author writes in that book is that "strategy is a highly dynamic area, full of fads and fashions that come and go", and that "copying ideas that 'work' for others is unlikely to be a winning strategy", because "success can only be based on being different from (existing or potential) competitors". The retrospective that Lafley and Martin provide in Appendix A would agree with these conclusions.
As explained by the authors, "strategies need continual improvement and updating", because as the authors have found, "competitors have copied P&G's strategies - on innovation, on branding, and the like - to an extent that renders P&G's resultant strategy less distinctive and decisive", and this is the challenge moving forward. In reflecting on its 175-year-plus history, the authors remark that "winning through distinctive choices is the always-and-forever job of every strategist", and if management continues to search for unique where-to-play and how-to-win choices that set the company apart, they should be able to further the success of the company.
I am pleased that A.G. Lafley has co-authored another book, with Roger Martin, after previously co-authoring The Game Changer with Ram Charan. Whereas in the first the focus is on how to drive revenue and profit growth with innovation, the focus in this book is on how strategy really works. Most of the time it doesn't and reasons vary. However, Lafley and Martin identify these familiar troublemakers:
1. Defining strategy as a vision
2. Defining strategy as a plan
3. Denying that the long-term (or even the medium-term) strategy is possible
4. Defining strategy as the optimization of the status quo.
5. Defining strategy as following best practices
Rather, Lafley and Martin suggest that a strategy "is a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems." In this context, I am reminded of two recently published books. In Judgment Calls, Tom Davenport and Brooke Manville offer "an antidote for the Great Man theory of decision making and organizational performance": [begin italics] organizational judgment [end italics]. That is, "the collective capacity to make good calls and wise moves when the need for them exceeds the scope of any single leader's direct control." In Martin's brilliant book, The Opposable Mind, he calls this "integrative thinking." Winning the game (whatever its nature and extent) would thus require a strategy that is both inclusive and collaborative.
In Paul Schoemaker's latest book, Brilliant Mistakes, he observes: "The key question companies need to address is not `[begin italics] Should [end italics] we make mistakes?' but rather `[begin italics] Which [end italics] mistakes should we make in order to test our deeply held assumptions?
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