Playing To Win: How Strategy Really Works

2 min readDec 2, 2022

What exactly is strategy? It really boils down to where to play and how to win.

Authors AG Lafley and Roger Martin reflect on their years at Proctor & Gamble, succinctly distilling down at its core what strategy really means.

What is not strategy?

defining it as a vision- this is a component but does not offer a guide to productive action or a road map for success. Further, it doesn’t say what business to be in vs. not, or focuses on competitive advantages or value creation. An aspirational vision that doesn’t explicit choices that need to be made to achieve it typically leads to unfulfilled and frustrated employees.
following best practices- defining against competition and then doing it better is sameness, which tends to lead to mediocrity

Making specific choices to win in the marketplace
creating a sustainable competitive advantage that deliberately chooses a different set of activities to deliver unique value
a set of five choices: winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management

The heart of strategy is from the two choices of where to play and how to win. Two questions that are central to figuring these out are:

do-it-all strategy: everything becomes a priority and there are no choices made
Don Quixote strategy: attacking competitive “walled cities” or taking on strongest competitor first
Waterloo strategy: starting wars on multiple fronts with multiple competitors at the same time, you will end up doing a lot of things weakly
something for everyone strategy: attempting to capture everything at once in a customer segment, instead you should decide to focus on serving some really well
dreams that never come true strategy: aspirations are not strategy, developing big goals but no action
program of the month strategy: settling for generic strategies that the rest of the competition is already doing and competing for