Of course, if we were able to watch a great athlete training, or a great writer writing, or a great coder coding, we would see that honing a strength is hard work—it is by no means easy to find that incremental margin of performance when you are already operating at a high level—and that a strength is not where we are most “finished” but in fact where we are most productively challenged. Yet we are told to resist the temptation to “just” play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses. In common parlance, we are told to avoid “running around our backhand.” This betrays, perhaps, a misunderstanding of what a strength actually is. It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiest—it is where performance is most impactful and increasing.

This is the fourth and final element of the logic flow. The question to address is this: is there some competitive response that could undermine or trump the where-to-play and how-to-win choices?

Inevitably, this is guesswork to some degree; you can’t know for sure what a competitor will or won’t do in the face of your actions. But forming a thoughtful hypothesis is important. It is far better to ask what your competitors will likely do before you proceed than to simply wait and see what happens. Only strategies that provide a sustainable advantage—or a significant lead in developing future advantages—are worth investing in. You don’t want to design and build a strategy that a competitor can copy in a heartbeat, or one that will prove ineffective against a simple defensive maneuver on a competitor’s part.

A strategy that only works if competitors continue to do exactly what they are already doing

is a dangerous strategy indeed.

To make good choices, you need to make sense of the complexity of your environment. The strategy logic flow can point you to the key areas of analysis necessary to generate sustainable competitive advantage. First, look to understand the industry in which you play (or will play), its distinct segments and their relative attractiveness. Without this step, it is all too easy to assume that your map of the world is the only possible map, that the world is unchanging, and that no better possibilities exist. Next, turn to customers. What do channel and end consumers truly want, need, and value—and how do those needs fit with your current or potential offerings? To answer this question, you will have to dig deep— engaging in joint value creation with channel partners and seeking a new understanding of end consumers. After customers, the lens turns inward: what are your capabilities and costs relative to the competition? Can you be a differentiator or a cost leader? If not, you will need to rethink your choices. Finally, consider competition; what will your competitors do in the face of your actions? Throughout the thinking process, be open to recasting previous analyses in light of what you learn in a subsequent box. The basic direction of the process is from left to right, but it also has interdependencies that require a more flexible path through it.

Reverse-engineering strategic options:

(Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.187) “1. Frame the Choice

As a general rule, an issue—for example, declining sales or technology change in the industry—can’t be resolved until it is framed as a choice. Until a real choice (e.g., should the company go in this direction or that one?) is articulated, team members can’t understand cognitively or feel emotionally the consequences of the different ways to resolve the issue. A team could talk endlessly about declining sales, making no progress toward solving the problem...

With Olay, framing the choice was crucial. It made the stakes clear immediately. Rather than agonizing endlessly about what to do with a fading brand, the team framed the choice and provided an impetus to action. The team laid out two possibilities: it could attempt to transform Oil of Olay into a worthy competitor to brands like Lancôme and La Prairie, or it could spend billions of dollars to buy a major existing skin-care brand to compete

instead.” (Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.188-189) “2. Generate Strategic Possibilities

Framing the issue as a choice identifies a preliminary set of options for resolving the problem; the next task is to broaden the list of possibilities. The objective in this step is to be inclusive rather than restrictive of the number and diversity of possibilities on the table. Here is the opportunity to encourage creative and more-unexpected strategies. In this

context, a possibility should be expressed as a narrative or scenario, a happy story that describes a positive outcome. That is why we like to call them possibilities rather than options. Characterizing the possibilities as stories helps ensure that they are not seen negatively as unsubstantiated opinions. No one is yet arguing for a possibility; you and your colleagues are simply envisioning a world in which that story makes good sense...

Culling a possibility about which a particular individual feels strongly may well cause that individual to withdraw, perhaps for the rest of the process. So inclusion, rather than exclusion, is the rule at this stage...

In the end, the P&G beauty team focused on five where-to-play and how- to-win possibilities for skin care. One was to largely give up on Oil of Olay and to acquire a major global skin-care brand. A second was to keep Oil of Olay positioned as an entry-priced, mass-market brand, strengthening its appeal to current consumers by leveraging R&D capabilities to improve wrinkle-fighting performance. A third was to take Oil of Olay up- market into the prestige distribution channel as an upscale brand. A fourth was to reinvent Olay totally—as a prestige-like brand that appealed more broadly to younger women (age thirty-five to fifty), but sold in the traditional mass channels with retail partners that would be willing to create a masstige experience with a special display section in the store. A fifth was to extend the Cover Girl brand from cosmetics into skin care.

Beyond risk aversion, there's another psychological pull toward option B. It's simply human nature to want to avoid weakness or to use your weaknesses as a guide for where to improve. Indeed, most gap analyses are built on this idea and then color-coded to reinforce the point: hunt down your biggest flaws (the red ones), and improve them; now move quickly on to the yellow ones. But this approach can be a disaster. When your weaknesses are enabling your strengths, reducing the gaps between you and your competitors can actually undermine performance, turning a well-intentioned improvement effort into a strategically dangerous paint-by-number exercise