Sameness isn’t strategy. It is a recipe for mediocrity.” (Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”,

p.5)

“Winning should be at the heart of any strategy. In our terms, a strategy is a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems.

To determine how to win, an organization must decide what will enable it to create unique value and sustainably deliver that value to customers in a way that is distinct from the firm’s competitors. Michael Porter called it competitive advantage—the specific way a firm utilizes its advantages to create superior value for a consumer or a customer and in turn, superior returns for the firm.

It isn’t entirely easy to make your way through the full choice cascade. Doing so isn’t a one-way, linear process. There is no checklist, whereby you create and articulate aspirations, then move on to where-to-play and how-to-win choices, then consider capabilities. Rather, strategy is an iterative process in which all of the moving parts influence one another and must be taken into account together.

Strategy as Winning – A.G. Lafley:

By the time of my election to CEO in 2000, most of P&G’s businesses were missing their goals, many by a wide margin. The company was overinvested and overextended. It was not winning with those who mattered most—consumers and customers. When I visited all our top retailers in my first thirty days on the job, I found that P&G was their biggest supplier but nowhere near their best supplier. Consumers were abandoning P&G, as evidenced by declining trial rates and market share on most of our leading brands. I was

determined to get P&G’s strategy right. To me, right meant that P&G would focus on

achievable ways to win with the consumers who mattered the most and against the very

best competition. It meant leaders would make real strategic choices (identifying what they would do and not do, where they would play and not play, and how specifically they would create competitive advantage to win). And it meant that leaders at all levels of the company would become capable strategists as well as capable operators. I was going to teach strategy until P&G was excellent at it. I wanted my team to understand that strategy is disciplined thinking that requires tough choices and is all about winning. Grow or grow faster is not a strategy. Build market share is not a strategy. Ten percent or greater earnings-per-share growth is not a strategy. Beat XYZ competitor is not a strategy. 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.

One final consideration for where to play is the competitive set. Just as it does when it defines winning aspirations, a company should make its where-to-play choices with the competition firmly in mind. Choosing a playing field identical to a strong competitor’s can be a less attractive proposition than tacking away to compete in a different way, for

different customers, or in different product lines. But strategy isn’t simply a matter of finding a distinctive path. A company may choose to play in a crowded field or in one with a dominant competitor if the company can bring new and distinctive value. In such a case, winning may mean targeting the lead competitor right away or going after weaker competitors first.