This returns us again to the central point of this section; the primary challenge you face is not in increasing creativity per se, but in making your company receptive to the vast amounts of creativity that already exist. The point is not to build a company that depends on you for its innovation, but to continually work towards an organization that is as receptive to new ideas as if those ideas had come from you.

Whichever path you take, we urge you to “think design” in every aspect of your business, from product development to marketing. Good design should permeate your company— buildings, processes, structures, products, the whole works.

With capabilities, again, winning is an essential criterion. Companies can be good at a lot of things. But there are a smaller number of activities that together create distinctiveness, underpinning specific where-to-play and how-to-win choices. P&G certainly needs to be good at manufacturing, but not distinctively good at it to win. On the other hand, P&G does need to be distinctively good at understanding consumers, at innovation, and at branding its products. When articulating core capabilities, you need to distinguish between generic strengths and critical, mutually reinforcing activities. A company needs to invest disproportionately in building the core capabilities that together produce competitive

advantage.

A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect.

Whenever a company succeeds greatly there is a complementary story of impeded competitive response. Sometimes the impediment is the innovator’s patent or similar protection, but more often it is an unwillingness or inability to replicate the innovator’s policies.