Playing To Win

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• And that is the single most crucial dimension of a company’s aspiration: a company must play to win. To play merely to participate is self-defeating. It is a recipe for mediocrity. Winning is what matters—and it is the ultimate criterion of a successful strategy.
• Do start with consumers, rather than products, when thinking about what it means to win.
• A strategy is a coordinated and integrated set of where-to-play, how-to-win, core capability, and management system choices that uniquely meet a consumer’s needs, thereby creating competitive advantage and superior value for a business. Strategy is a way to win—and nothing less.
• Deep consumer understanding is at the heart of the strategy discussion.
• A choice to serve everyone, everywhere—or to simply serve all comers—is a losing choice.
• “We don’t give lip service to consumer understanding. We dig deep. We immerse ourselves in people’s day-to-day lives. We work hard to find the tensions that we can help resolve. From those tensions come insights that lead to big ideas.”
• Ultimately, Febreze was a product technology in search of a job to be done.
  • Not always bad
• “Let’s go to a white sheet of paper,” she told her team, “keeping the consumer in mind. Let’s find out what those consumers actually need and build that diaper. You only build what they need; you don’t build all the bells and whistles that only consumers in developed markets expect.”
• powerful and sustainable competitive advantage is unlikely to arise from any one capability (e.g., having the best sales force in the industry or the best technology in the industry), but rather from a set of capabilities that both fit with one another (i.e., that don’t conflict with one another) and actually reinforce one another (i.e., that make each other stronger than they would be alone).
• A strategy discussion is not an idea review. A strategy discussion is not a budget or a forecast review. A strategy discussion is how we are going to accomplish our growth objectives in the next three to five years. We really wanted to engage in a discussion.”
• The kind of dialogue we wanted to foster is called assertive inquiry. Built on the work of organizational learning theorist Chris Argyris at Harvard Business School, this approach blends the explicit expression of your own thinking (advocacy) with a sincere exploration of the thinking of others (inquiry). In other words, it means clearly articulating your own ideas and sharing the data and reasoning behind them, while genuinely inquiring into the thoughts and reasoning of your peers.
• We wanted to be clear about just who the most important stakeholder is and always should be. Not shareholders. Not employees. Not retail customers. But rather the end user: the people who buy and use P&G products.
• To do so, you have scores of tools at your disposal—from simple analyses like SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to purpose-built tools like the Boston Consulting Group growth matrix and General Electric–McKinsey nine-box matrix to detailed frameworks based on particular strategic theories (the VRIN model, which assesses the degree to which the organization possesses capabilities that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable, and which emerged from the resource-based view of the firm).
• Tags: blue
• The industry. What is the structure of your industry and the attractiveness of its segments? Customers. What do your channel and end customers value? Relative position. How does your company fare, and how could it fare, relative to the competition? Competition. What will your competition do in reaction to your chosen course of action? These four dimensions can be understood through a framework we call the strategy logic flow,
• Tags: blue