Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

If strategy is about creating a competitive advantage that allows a firm to win, then pinpointing your strategy to a few critically important choices will dramatically increase your chances of success. This is especially true in the volatile and complex environment that has become the norm for all of us.

Yet the authors of Playing to Win, A. G. Lafley, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble and one of the most successful business leaders of the last century, and Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, say most firms shy away from these difficult strategic choices, settling instead for false approaches that can lead to irreversible blunders. Among the most common:

• Mistaking tactics for strategy
• Using "the world is changing" excuse to make it up as you go
• Tweaking outdated plans to minimize disruption
• Leaning on strategy consultants to make the tough choices

Don't be most firms. Drawn on their years of experience working together and separately at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, Lafley and Martin present a deceptively simple set of exercises and questions that can guide the decisions of anyone in an organization. The book helps you and those who work with you to figure out the relationship of the day-to-day work to larger strategic goals-something woefully lacking from many strategy books but also from the real world.

There are plenty of books written by CEOs that champion the work that, truthfully, only they could do, in their unique circumstances with their considerable resources. Playing to Win is different. It's a strategy book for everyone, that works everywhere. Once you open it you'll see why it's the only strategy book you'll ever need.