Playing To Win
Four Years of Playing to Win Strategy
What I Have Learned Thus Far
There are now four years of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) series in the can (as they say in the movie business). I thought it would make sense look back on the whole series to see what I can glean from the reader views, reads and claps of the pieces to make Year V even better. Reader responses to last week’s review of Year IV were terrific, and I hope I receive more to this piece. Next week I will set out on Year V and will figure out whether that will be my last year or not. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
A Quick Summary
Before doing a deep dive into the pieces themselves, I will give a quick summary of the overall series.
It is up to 208 original content pieces — 52 per year for four years. That is a lot of content, the equivalent of 5.5 books the length of the original Playing to Win (PTW). Given how long it takes to write a book, I am somewhat boggled that I wrote the equivalent of 5.5 books in 4 years.
There are 225 total pieces (including this one) because in addition to the above 208 pieces, there have been 15 year-end summaries/analyses (like this one), and two miscellaneous pieces (a celebration of the million-view mark and a data addendum to another piece).
Cumulatively, there have been 2.2 million views, 830 thousand reads, and 115 thousand claps. I like that. It is about 10 thousand views per piece, with the viewer reading 2 of 5 pieces in their entirety, and claps for 1 in 7 articles that were read.
Happily, the series has built a very nice following on the Medium platform. I just hit 250 thousand followers on January 12, 2025. I have been on the platform since July 23, 2020, which is 233 weeks (though I only started PTW/PI on Oct 5, 2020). So, I have added more than one thousand net new followers per week. I am up to the 6th most followed individual on Medium. The most followed is Tim Denning, who focuses on personal career/financial development, with 327 thousand views. But I am slowly but surely catching up! Over the past two years, I am up 20% while he has been flat (as have the other four above me). I may hit a followership wall as they have, but if I keep adding at the current pace, I will catch up in a couple of years. Only time will tell!
Thematic Deep Dive
With four years in the books, I decided it was a good time to do a deeper dive into the 208 original pieces. I have done this earlier in the series, but I wanted to do it more thoroughly this year.
Having reviewed all 208 pieces fully, I have come to believe that they can be grouped into five categories — plus a handful of idiosyncratic pieces in a miscellaneous category.
1) Strategy Choice Cascade
The first category is comprised of pieces on the Strategy Choice Cascade (SCC), which deals with the core content of strategy. The pieces explain what the five boxes mean — how to understand them.
The first piece in the entire series, The Role of Management Systems in Strategy, was a response to a client question about the last box in the SCC. Later, I did a popular one on the first box (Winning Aspiration) called The Motivation for Strategy. I have done pieces on the whole thing, such as Decoding the Strategy Choice Cascade, which was also very popular.
This has ended up being a small category — at 9% of the 208 pieces. But it has been a popular category with the pieces averaging 27% more reads than the average PTW/PI piece.
2) The Strategic Choice Structuring Process
If you are persuaded that the SCC is a good framework for strategy, how would you use it to develop one? That is the subject of this category, which delves into the use of the Strategic Choice Structuring Process (SCSP) to create strategy.
Very popular pieces in this category include explaining how to use the What Would Have to be True (WWHTBT) question (What Would Have to be True?), providing advice on questions to ask in the strategy process (What Strategy Questions are you Asking?), explaining the mindset that goes into productive strategic thinking work (What is Strategic Thinking? — BTW the 3rd most read piece in the entire PTW/PI series), and suggesting where to start your strategy process (Where to Start with Strategy?).
This is a bigger category with 16% of total pieces and has been very popular, with average reads 33% above the PTW/PI series average.
3) Core Strategy Principles
The third category is what I have come to call ‘Core Strategy Principles.’ It includes pieces that deal with ways of thinking about the practice of strategy that are helpful to the creation of higher quality strategy. They are not about the boxes of the SCC per se (category #1) or about the steps in the process of building strategy (category #2), but rather about principles to keep in mind when doing strategy.
For example, one highly popular piece in this category lays out the mindset and skills to be great at strategy (What Makes for a Great Strategist?). Another popular one talks about ways to think about the context in which you do strategy (The Strategy Lesson from the Bud Light Fiasco). Still another one talks about the conditions that have made strategy a lost art (The Lost Art of Strategy).
This is one of the two very big categories with 31% of the total pieces in the series. While some have been very popular (like the three above which average 2.3 times the average), on average the category has 25% fewer reads than the average PTW/PI piece.
Some have been surprisingly unpopular, including one on the very important topic of customer habits and what happens (short answer: it’s really bad) when you force customers to break theirs (Strategic Breadcrumb Spacing — 76% below average) and another on the critical question of how a company gets customers to try its offering for the first time (Strategy for Generating Trial — 75% below).
Maybe these are like eating your vegetables. Your parents know they are good for you, but you would rather have ice cream. I would never stop writing these — but they are clearly for narrower audiences.
4) Relationships: PTW vs…
In this category, the pieces discuss how PTW relates to another topic of interest to readers.
Sometimes it is a management topic that is relatively closely related to strategy, for example planning. Strategy vs. Planning: Complements not Substitutes (which is the 2nd most read PTW/PI piece) argues that they are different but complementary. Another set of pieces discusses the relation between PTW and an alternative theory about strategy, such as Business Model Generation & Playing to Win. Still others describe the relation between PTW and another non-strategy topic — Strategy & Artificial Intelligence is a prototypical example.
This one is the other big category — the biggest in fact — at 33% of the total series — with readership slightly below PTW/PI average (-17%).
As with the above category, some of them had surprisingly low leadership — like Competing Against Big New Entrants (-77%) and Talent Strategy in 2022 (-75%). The first was maybe too narrow a topic, but the second isn’t. It has very low views and a poor conversion to reads, but a very high clap rate — enjoyed if read, but little read.
It will continue to be an important category for the series. It is easier for the human mind to understand things (ideas or otherwise) by way of comparison — a car is a horseless carriage; a snowboard is a skateboard for snow, etc. In the case of Strategy vs. Planning, planning had been around for decades if not centuries before strategy came into existence. When strategy came along, the easiest way to think about it was big-picture planning. In this case, I needed to help the reader get past the constraints of that straight-line comparison to something more sophisticated.
5) Frontal Assaults
The final category is made up of pieces that launch a frontal attack on the dominant theory, or revealed wisdom if you prefer, in some area related to strategy. In these pieces, I make the best argument I can muster to convince readers to cease and desist thinking about the subject the way they currently do — and adopt a new way to think.
I had many targets. For example, you think that being too busy is somehow meritorious. No, it because your strategy for life sucks — Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks (the single most read article in the PTW/PI series). Or you think (especially if you are a technology company) that deploying an OKR to somebody significantly increases the likelihood that it will happen. No, it doesn’t, unless you have a real strategy — Stop Letting OKRs Masquerade as Strategy (4th most read). Or you think that SWOT analyses are valuable, if not essential, to strategy development. No, they are a useless waste of time — It’s Time to Toss SWOT Analysis in the Ashbin of Strategy History (5th most read).
It is a small category — same size as the first category at 9%. And it is the most popular category with average reads 55% over the series average.
The pieces are probably a bit click-bait-y — lots of people probably view a piece because of the inflammatory title, as with the three above. But they read and clap for them, so it goes past the view-response to the inflammatory title.
I have inadvertently ramped down this category. I did fourteen in Years I & II and only four in Years III & IV. I must keep this category in mind.
Miscellaneous
There are a handful of pieces that don’t fit any category or each other such as Michael Porter’s Three Great Strategy Contributions, The Business of Strategy Consulting (my rant about the modern state of this dreadful industry), Being Fired — Repeatedly (my much-requested story of being fired three times at Procter & Gamble). Their statistics are all over the map — like their topics.
Reflections
I have gotten lots of feedback from my request for it in last week’s piece. The dominant theme was to not listen too much. Readers value me writing about what I think is important and not depending on readers to determine that. And don’t worry so much about the low-end numbers.
I hear you and appreciate the thoughts. Someone very close to me (OK, my beloved wife) exhorted me to be true to myself and my convictions. I guarantee to all readers that I will.
That having been said, I do think that paying attention to the categories doesn’t go against the above advice. I should look for more opportunities — though only ones that are consistent with my convictions — in categories 1 and 2. Lots of these pieces come from my experiences with client work. But I would welcome more ideas from readers.
On category 4 — PTW vs. xx — I am always open to suggestions. The subcategory of PTW vs. another business book always comes from reader requests.
I won’t be as sheepish as I am about doing category 5 pieces. I don’t love being that aggressive — but sometimes it really needs to be done. This category mainly comes from within — and I will blast away as I see fit.
I will close by expressing my most sincere gratitude for all the support of the series during the past four years. I write because people read! And I look forward to next week and the start of Year V of PTW/PI.
