Based on Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin
Many organizations have strategic plans. Far fewer have a true strategy.
That distinction is at the heart of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger L. Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management.
Their central idea is remarkably straightforward: strategy is choice. Strategy isn't simply setting goals, developing a vision statement, creating a budget, or producing a list of initiatives. It is making a deliberate set of choices about where an organization will compete and how it intends to win. Martin describes strategy as a set of interrelated choices that positions an organization to win.
Playing to Win vs. Playing to Play
One of the most important lessons from Playing to Win is contained in the title itself.
Organizations can approach their markets with the goal of participating, or with the intention of winning. Playing to play can lead organizations to spread their resources across too many markets, pursue every available opportunity, and attempt to be everything to everyone. Playing to win requires greater discipline.
It means deciding what you will do exceptionally well, and just as importantly, what you will not do.
Without those choices, a strategic plan can easily become a collection of goals rather than an actual strategy.
The Five Choices of Strategy
Lafley and Martin organize strategy around five interconnected questions known as the Strategy Choice Cascade.
1. What Is Our Winning Aspiration?
The first question defines what winning actually means. An organization needs more than a general ambition to grow or become more profitable. It needs a clear understanding of the value it wants to create, the customers it wants to serve, and what success will ultimately look like.
A strong winning aspiration provides direction for every strategic decision that follows.
2. Where Will We Play?
No organization has unlimited resources. Where to play determines the markets, customers, industries, geographies, products, services, and channels where the organization will concentrate its efforts.
The difficult part isn't identifying opportunities. It's choosing among them. A company that tries to pursue every opportunity risks becoming average across many areas rather than exceptional in a few.
3. How Will We Win?
Once an organization decides where it will compete, it must determine how it will succeed there. Why should customers choose you instead of the alternatives?
The answer might involve superior service, specialized expertise, innovation, speed, convenience, cost, quality, customer experience, or another meaningful competitive advantage. The critical point is that where to play and how to win must work together. Roger Martin emphasizes that the five strategic choices need to reinforce one another rather than operate independently.
4. What Capabilities Must We Have?
Strategy cannot exist only at the leadership level. If an organization has decided how it intends to win, it needs the capabilities required to deliver on that promise.
These could include technical expertise, leadership, recruiting, sales, customer relationships, operational excellence, innovation, data analytics, project management, or other organizational strengths. This is where strategy begins connecting directly to people and operations.
Instead of asking, "What are we good at?", organizations should also ask: "What must we become exceptionally good at for our strategy to succeed?"
That subtle change in perspective can significantly influence hiring, training, technology investments, processes, and organizational structure.
5. What Management Systems Are Required?
Finally, organizations need systems that reinforce their strategic choices. Performance measures, incentives, processes, meetings, accountability structures, technology, and decision-making systems should all support the strategy.
If an organization says customer service is its competitive advantage but primarily rewards employees for reducing the amount of time spent with customers, its management systems are working against its strategy. Execution becomes much easier when organizational systems reinforce the behaviours required to win.
Strategy Requires Saying No
Perhaps the most valuable lesson in Playing to Win is that strategy requires trade-offs. Every "yes" should create some "no's."
Choosing particular markets means deciding not to pursue others. Choosing a particular customer means accepting that another customer may not be the right fit. Investing heavily in one capability means having fewer resources available for something else.
This is why strategy can be uncomfortable. Keeping every option open feels safe. But when organizations refuse to make choices, resources become diluted and priorities become unclear.
If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
Strategy Isn't a Once-a-Year Exercise
The Strategy Choice Cascade shouldn't simply be completed during an annual planning meeting and then filed away.
The choices influence one another and should continually be tested as customers, competitors, technologies, and organizational capabilities evolve. Martin describes the framework as interconnected rather than a set of independent questions.
Leaders should continually ask:
Strategy therefore becomes an ongoing management discipline rather than an annual planning exercise.
From Strategy to Execution
One reason Playing to Win remains such a useful strategy framework is that it connects high-level thinking with execution.
The cascade moves naturally from aspiration to action:
Winning Aspiration → Where to Play → How to Win → Capabilities → Management Systems
Each choice makes the next one more concrete. A vision without choices is simply an aspiration. Choices without capabilities are intentions. Capabilities without management systems can be difficult to sustain.
But when all five reinforce one another, strategy becomes something employees can actually understand and execute.
The Bottom Line
Playing to Win challenges leaders to stop treating strategy as a planning document and start treating it as a series of deliberate choices.
The question isn't simply "What do we want to accomplish?" The more important questions are: Where are we going to play? How are we going to win there? What must we be exceptionally good at to make that happen? And perhaps the hardest question of all: what are we willing to say no to?
Organizations that can answer those questions clearly have moved beyond simply planning for the future. They have made a choice about how they intend to win.