Playing to Win

Picture this: you're sitting in a boardroom where everyone agrees the company needs a new strategy, but after hours of discussion, you walk away with nothing but vague aspirations and conflicting opinions. Sound familiar? This scenario plays out in countless organizations every day, where leaders mistake activity for strategy and confuse busy work with meaningful choices.

The truth is, strategy isn't about creating the perfect mission statement or conducting endless market research. It's about making integrated, mutually reinforcing choices that position your organization to win in the marketplace. Too many companies fall into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone, spreading their resources thin and failing to create sustainable competitive advantage. Real strategy requires the courage to say no to good opportunities so you can say yes to great ones, and it demands a clear framework for making those critical decisions that will determine your success or failure.

At its core, winning isn't just about showing up to compete – it's about deliberately choosing to dominate in your chosen arena. A winning aspiration goes far beyond financial targets or market share goals; it defines the fundamental purpose of your enterprise and creates the context for every strategic choice that follows.

Consider the transformation of Olay, once dismissively called "Oil of Old Lady" by consumers. The brand was trapped in a declining spiral, losing relevance with each passing year as its customer base aged. Rather than accepting gradual decline, the team asked a fundamental question: what would winning look like for this brand? They didn't settle for modest improvements or defensive moves. Instead, they aspired to revolutionize how women thought about anti-aging skincare, targeting a completely different demographic with a bold new value proposition.

The process begins by asking yourself what winning truly means in your context. Are you trying to serve everyone, or are you committed to being indispensable to a specific group of customers? Winning aspirations should make your employees excited to come to work and give customers a compelling reason to choose you over alternatives. They should be specific enough to guide decision-making but inspiring enough to motivate extraordinary effort.

Start by defining winning from your customers' perspective rather than your own internal metrics. What problem are you uniquely positioned to solve? What would make customers absolutely love what you do? Then translate that external focus into clear aspirations that your entire organization can rally around.

Remember, if you're not playing to win, you're just playing – and in today's competitive landscape, playing without the intention to win is a guaranteed path to mediocrity and eventual failure.

The heart of strategy lies in two interconnected choices: where you will compete and how you will win in those chosen spaces. These decisions work in tandem to create your competitive advantage, and getting them right can transform struggling businesses into market leaders.

When Bounty faced declining performance, the team discovered they were trying to serve everyone with a single product approach. Through deep consumer research, they identified three distinct segments: customers who valued both strength and absorbency, those who wanted a cloth-like feel, and price-conscious buyers who cared primarily about strength. Rather than force one product to satisfy all three groups poorly, they created three different Bounty variants, each designed specifically for its target segment. Bounty Extra Soft appealed to the texture-focused group, while Bounty Basic offered superior strength at a value price point.

The where-to-play choice involves selecting your competitive arena across multiple dimensions: which geographic markets, which customer segments, which product categories, and which distribution channels will give you the best chance to win. This isn't about expanding everywhere possible – it's about choosing the battlefield where your capabilities can create decisive advantage.

How-to-win choices define your approach to creating superior value in your chosen spaces. Will you compete through cost leadership, delivering comparable value at lower prices? Or will you differentiate by providing unique value that customers will pay a premium for? The key is ensuring these choices reinforce each other rather than work at cross-purposes.

Start by mapping the landscape of where you could potentially play, then honestly assess where your capabilities give you the best chance of winning. Focus on segments where you can be not just competitive, but dominant. Remember, trying to win everywhere usually means winning nowhere.

Core capabilities are the activities your organization must excel at to bring your strategic choices to life. They represent the engine that powers your ability to win in your chosen markets, and they must be purposefully built and continuously strengthened to maintain competitive advantage.

When Procter & Gamble acquired Gillette, the success wasn't just about combining two strong companies – it was about leveraging complementary capabilities to create something more powerful than either could achieve alone. P&G brought deep consumer understanding and global scale, while Gillette contributed world-class innovation in product development and merchandising excellence. The integration team identified five critical capabilities that would drive success: consumer understanding, innovation, brand building, go-to-market excellence, and global scale.

Your capabilities must work as an integrated system where each element reinforces the others. Think of them as the interconnected gears of a machine – when they work together smoothly, they create momentum that's difficult for competitors to match. Innovation capabilities mean little without the brand-building expertise to communicate value to customers, and great products fail without the operational excellence to deliver them consistently.

Begin by identifying the three to five activities that most directly enable your where-to-play and how-to-win choices. Ask yourself: what must we be distinctively good at to succeed? Then assess your current capabilities honestly against this standard. Where are the gaps between what you need and what you have?

Building capabilities requires sustained investment and attention. It's not enough to be good at something – you need to be better than competitors in ways that matter to customers and that are difficult to replicate.

Management systems are the often-overlooked foundation that transforms strategic intent into consistent execution. Without robust systems to support your choices and capabilities, even the most brilliant strategy remains nothing more than wishful thinking.

P&G revolutionized its strategy review process by abandoning the traditional "corporate theater" approach where presentations became defensive performances. Instead, they created collaborative dialogues focused on strategic issues identified in advance. These sessions limited attendance to essential participants, banned lengthy PowerPoint presentations, and encouraged open inquiry rather than advocacy. The result was dramatically improved strategic thinking throughout the organization and better decision-making at every level.

Effective management systems operate across three critical dimensions: strategy creation and review, capability building, and performance measurement. Your strategy creation process should encourage honest dialogue about real challenges rather than polished presentations that hide problems. Capability-building systems ensure you're continuously strengthening the activities that drive competitive advantage.

Measurement systems must capture both leading and lagging indicators of success. Financial results tell you where you've been, but measures of customer satisfaction, capability development, and competitive position tell you where you're headed.

Design systems that make it easy to do the right things and difficult to drift from your strategic choices. Create regular rhythms for reviewing and refining your strategy, not just your budgets. Most importantly, ensure your systems reinforce the behaviors and decisions that support your strategic choices rather than undermining them through conflicting incentives.

Strategic thinking requires a structured approach to understanding your competitive environment and the conditions necessary for success. The strategy logic flow provides a framework for analyzing four critical dimensions: industry structure, customer value, your relative position, and competitive dynamics.

When P&G considered entering new markets with innovative products like Impress self-sealing wrap, they faced entrenched competitors with deep pockets and strong market positions. Rather than charging ahead with superior technology alone, they systematically analyzed what it would take to win. They examined industry attractiveness, understood both retail and consumer value equations, assessed their relative capabilities and costs, and anticipated competitive reactions. This analysis revealed that a traditional market entry would likely trigger a costly war with uncertain outcomes.

Start by mapping your industry's structure and identifying the segments where you could potentially create sustainable advantage. Understanding structural attractiveness helps you focus on spaces where profits are possible, not just where revenue exists. Next, dive deep into what customers truly value, recognizing that channel partners and end users often have different priorities.

Honestly assess your relative position in terms of both capabilities and costs. Can you deliver distinctive value that customers will pay for, or can you match competitors' value at significantly lower cost? Finally, think through how competitors might react to your strategic moves and whether you can still win in the face of their likely responses.

The goal isn't to analyze everything perfectly, but to understand the key factors that will determine success or failure in your chosen arena. Use this understanding to make more informed choices about where to play and how to win.

Strategy is fundamentally about making choices – clear, tough choices about where you will compete and how you will win. The companies that thrive are those that resist the temptation to be everything to everyone and instead focus on being exceptional at serving specific customers in distinctive ways.

As the book powerfully states, "Strategy is choice. More specifically, strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition." The five strategic choices – winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems – must work together as a coherent whole, with each choice reinforcing and supporting the others.

The time to begin is now. Start by honestly examining your current strategy through the lens of these five choices. Where are the gaps between your aspirations and your actual choices? What trade-offs are you avoiding that need to be made? Take the first step by clearly defining what winning means for your organization, then begin making the integrated choices that will turn that aspiration into reality.