Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

what is our winning aspiration?—defines the purpose of your enterprise, its guiding mission and aspiration, in strategic terms. What does winning look like for this organization?

Focus is a crucial winning attribute. Attempting to be all things to all customers tends to result in underserving everyone.

It can also be tempting to view a where-to-play choice as a given, as having been made for you. But a company always has a choice of where to play.

Don’t assume that the dynamics of an industry are set and immutable. The choices of the players within those industries may be creating the dynamics.

Action consistent with the how-to-win choice is vital.

it isn’t about finding the perfect language or the consensus view, but is about connecting to a deeper idea of what the organization exists to do.

While all companies make efforts to control costs, there is only one low-cost player in any industry—the competitor with the very lowest costs. Having lower costs than some but not all competitors can enable a firm to stick around and compete for a while. But it won’t win. Only the true low-cost player can win with a low-cost strategy.

We work hard to find the tensions that we can help resolve. From those tensions come insights that lead to big ideas.”2 Those big ideas can be the basis of a powerful where-to-play choice.

A better product fulfilled an unmet consumer need, delivered a better user experience, and created better total consumer value.