Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

business, I have found that most leaders do not like to make choices. They’d rather keep their options open. Choices force their hands, pin them down, and generate an uncomfortable degree of personal risk. I’ve also found that few leaders can truly define winning. They generally speak of short-term financial measures or a simple share of a narrowly

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? What, specifically, is its strategic aspiration?

Strategy therefore requires making explicit choices—to do some things and not others—and building a business around those choices.

strategy is an iterative process in which all of the moving parts influence one another and must be taken into account together.

competitors’. To succeed in the long run, you must make thoughtful, creative decisions about how to win. In doing so, you enable your organization to sustainably provide a better value equation for consumers than competitors do and create competitive advantage.

A too-modest aspiration is far more dangerous than a too-lofty one. Too many companies eventually die a death of modest aspirations.

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.

The people at Olay aren’t harder working, more dedicated, bolder, or luckier than everyone else. But their way of thinking about the choices they made was different.