Playing To Win
The Secret to Making Strategy Choices Even Better
I frequently get asked a question about questions: What questions should I ask when I am reviewing a strategy? Because of that consistent interest, I am dedicating my 36th Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights piece to Asking Great Strategy Questions.
Three Categories of Questions
I am often asked to evaluate strategies, whether for clients, students, or friends. Rather than focus primarily on whether the strategy is good or bad, I focus on asking questions with the intention of guiding the authors toward their goal of creating great strategies. To provide that help, I ask strategy questions in three broad categories: logic…
Playing To Win
What’s Next After Strategy?
The interplay of strategy and planning is fraught with confusion. A testament to the interest in the subject is that Strategy vs. Planning: Complements not Substitutes is the second most popular of my first 34 Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI). Another piece related to the topic, Strategic Choice Chartering, is also highly read, reinforcing the level of interest. Still, I get questions, lots of good questions, on the relationship between strategy and planning. So, my 35thPTW/PI is on From Strategy to Planning: What is Next After Strategy?
Going Back to First Principles
The most typical question I get asked is…
Playing To Win
How to Make Strategy Choices to Accelerate Your Career
I get many questions about the breadth of Playing to Win’s applicability. Does it work for start-ups? Does it work for non-profits? Does it work for functions? (Yes, yes, and yes) But only once have I been asked about Playing to Win for an individual, an insightful question with a broadly applicable answer. So, I decided to dedicate my 34th Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) to Your Personal Playing to Win Strategy
The Fallacies about the Modern Job
There have been vast changes in the structure of work over the past century. A century ago, nearly 90% of jobs were…
Playing To Win
There Can Be No Data About the Future
There was so much interest in, commentary on, and even befuddlement about Strategists: Stop Obsessing about Averages that I decided to write a follow up piece on related misuse of data analytics. My 33rd Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights is on The Pervasive Analytical Blunder of Strategists.
Modern Business Training
Modern business education trains all students to believe that good decisions are based on rigorous analysis of data, and strategy courses are certainly no exception. Managers who don’t make decisions based on rigorous analysis of data are presented as willfully incompetent managers. They know better. Yet they insist through sloth, arrogance, and/or ignorance in…
Playing To Win
How to Use Playing to Win to Make Sense of Digital Strategy
These days, the strategy subject about which I get asked most frequently is ‘digital strategy.’ How can my strategy benefit from digital transformation? How does Playing to Win apply to digital strategy? Because of the sheer volume of these related questions, I am dedicating my 32nd Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece to What is Digital Strategy, Anyway?
Why the Fascination?
There is endless fascination about digital strategy in the business world today, which if you are not engaging in, your company is written off as a dinosaur lumbering around in the 21st century just waiting to fall into a…
Notes from Industry, Playing To Win
The Only Way to Create the Future is to Pay Attention to the Outliers
I am utterly tired of the modern strategy focus on averages, whether means, medians, or modes. It is Achilles Heel of data analytics/Big Data/Artificial Intelligence. That is why I am dedicating my 31st Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) to encouraging strategists to go beyond obsessing about averages.
The Modern Focus on Averages
In world of strategy, all analytical guns have long been trained on means, medians, and modes. What is the most representative customer behavior? What is the biggest customer need? What is the average cost of our product? How do most people get information about our product? What is…
Playing To Win
The Two Skills Every Strategist Must Master
After two very macro-themed Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) pieces — about the strategy function overall and about a widely-used strategy tool — I am going micro, diving into the mind of the individual strategist with my 30th PTW/PI on the two thinking skills every strategist must master: Manipulation of Quantities & Appreciation of Qualities. For the insights that inspired this piece, I thank my friend and collaborator, Hilary Austen.
Manipulation of Quantities
Because of the origins of the practice, the prototypical strategy person is an analytical wizard/geek. Institutions tend to shape themselves in the image of a seminal figure…
Playing To Win
They Started in Separate Places but have Converged
When I work with tech companies, I find it striking how ambivalent most are about strategy. They tend to see it as an unhelpful bureaucratic planning exercise in an industry is too fast moving for strategy. On the former, they are right to be skeptical. As I have written about in this series, most strategic planning is dominantly planning and not strategic. However, the latter is a fallacy that I have also written about in this series. …
Playing To Win
SWOT is a Dreadful Way to Start a Strategy Process
I am tired of reading SWOT analyses. My annoyance is not because of the amount of time I waste reading them — which is a lot. It is about the time some poor souls wasted putting them together. That is why I have decided to write my 28th Playing to Win Practitioner Insights post on It’s Time to Toss SWOT Analysis into the Ashbin of Strategy History.
A Bit of History
Arguably the most venerable and frequently deployed analytical tool in all of strategy is the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (aka SWOT) Analysis, which came into existence at the…
Playing To Win
Not if you Want to be Great over Time
The Playing to Win strategy question that I probably get most often is: why can’t we be both a cost leader and a differentiator? Given the question’s frequency, and the critical importance of the answer, I am going to provide a comprehensive answer in my 27th Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights piece on Can you be Both Cost Leader & Differentiator.
Why the Frequency of the Question?
I think I get the question as often as I do for two reasons. First is that in advising on strategy, I emphasize the need to choose and in general people don’t like to…
Roger Martin
Professor Roger Martin is a writer, strategy advisor and in 2017 was named the #1 management thinker in world. He is also former Dean of the Rotman School.
