Playing To Win
Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights Series Year IV Review
Ranking & Evaluating the Most & Least Popular
Historically, at the conclusion of each Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) year, I have provided a ranking of the Year’s top articles and republished those pieces, each with a short introduction. But last year, Medium objected to that because it violates Medium’s rule against republishing. Who knew?
So, I won’t do that this year. Instead, I am going to write two review pieces before starting PTW/PI Year V. This piece focuses on reviewing Year IV. Next one will be a retrospective on the whole series from Year I through Year IV. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
Thoughts on Year IV
I was pleased with Year IV of the PTW/PI series. The series continued to grow followership — by about 1000/week. The pieces created lots of great dialogue on Medium itself, LinkedIn, and X. Near the end of 2022, Medium created its ‘boost’ program to provide extra distribution for pieces its editors saw as worthy. It judged 54% of my Year III pieces to be worthy of a boost. In Year IV, it increased dramatically to 75%. I appreciate the support.
Again, in collaboration with Darren Karn (thanks!), the 52 pieces were ranked on views, reads, and claps and then the individual rankings weighted equally to come to an overall ranking. I will give my commentary on why I think the top five were so popular and, for the first time, why the bottom two definitively weren’t. I welcome all thoughts and comments on my thinking because that will influence Year V — I am going to do one more year and then think about what comes next.
The Top Five
In reverse order, these are the five that were most popular with readers, who viewed, read and clapped for them:
#5 The Best Strategy Icebreaker: Reverse-Engineering the Strategy of Your Competitors
This piece represents what I think of as a classically successful genre for PTW/PI in which I provide a piece of advice on how to run a PTW strategy process. If the advice is helpful to most people that are engaged in the activity, it makes the piece very popular. That was the case for this #5 ranked piece — and same holds for the #1 piece, which I will discuss later below.
In this piece, I describe what I find to be the most useful way to start a strategy process. It is not unlike starting a meeting or dinner party with an icebreaker of some sort. The features of good icebreaker are that it is not intimidating, and it is fun. So, you don’t make your dinner party icebreaker to describe your latest book. It would be a downer for anyone at the party who has never written a book — and it would be deadly dull. A better one is what is the most embarrassing thing you did while at college or who is your #1 celebrity crush!
Starting with a competitor is less intimidating than starting with the company itself. The latter is too controversial because there will be engrained and often contradictory views. And empirically, I find that reserve-engineering the strategy of a respected competitor is fun for teams. Plus, if it is a respected competitor, it will typically have made the kind of real strategic choices that make for a strong PTW strategy. That will provide an inspiring model for the management team when it addresses its own strategy choices.
#4 Good Strategy/Bad Strategy & Playing to Win: Compatibility and Utility
This piece is an example of another much-requested and loved genre — relating Playing to Win to another popular business book (or concept in one case). I started doing these in Year III with Jobs to be Done, Blue Ocean Strategy, Business Model Generation, Balanced Scorecard, and How Brands Grow. I followed this up this year with The Goal, 7 Powers, Concept of Corporate Strategy, and this one: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy.
They have all been popular — and the popularity is largely correlated with the popularity of the book in question — with Business Model Generation and Good Strategy/Bad Strategy being the most popular.
Somewhat embarrassingly, I hadn’t read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy before being asked to write about it. I had read Richard Rumelt’s subsequent book The Crux because he sent it to me requesting a blurb — and I tell the story in this piece.
I found the book relatively compatible with Playing to Win. I describe ways in which it is a bit less actionable than I would wish. But my overall take on it was that I can understand why it has lots of proponents.
#3 The Business of Strategy Consulting: Cheeseburger & Pepsi
I don’t do many in this genre, which features a very pointed critique aimed at a specific target. It can be a tool like OKRs or SWOT, or a concept like execution, or brand like Bud Light or Jaguar. These are some of my most popular articles over the four years of the series, in particular, OKRs and SWOT — they seriously pissed some folks off!
In this case, the target was the (so-called) strategy consulting firm giants, McKinsey, BCG, and Bain & Company (often referred to as MBB). In the article, I touch on my distaste for their ‘gainsharing’ cost reduction projects but focus principally on my complete disgust with the way MBB consult based on industry expertise. And I will repeat my admonition in the piece: if you are in the top quintile of your industry and you hire MBB, you are a fool because you are going to help your competitors plenty more than MBB will help you. It is as simple as that!
#2 Strategy & Artificial Intelligence: A Story of Heuristics, Means & Tails
This is a case of a piece on a hyper-popular topic being — guess what — highly popular. I wrote two pieces on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and this one is #2 and the other one is #8. The reader message is that I should do more on AI and I will comply. And I would welcome thoughts on what you would love to hear on this front.
This piece takes the perspective that AI is a device for advancing knowledge from mystery to heuristic to algorithm — what I called The Knowledge Funnel in The Design of Business — faster and more efficiently.
But the dark side is that AI is a mean/median/mode-seeking device. It would be nice if AI could find the tip of the right tail of the distribution. But it doesn’t even look for it — and can’t. That is something to bear in mind while using AI for its many useful purposes.
#1 Where to Start with Strategy? Focus on Betterment
As I foreshadowed above, the #1 piece is also in the category of advice on how to run a PTW strategy process that people find helpful. This was super-popular — it was #1 in views, reads and claps.
To me, the reader reaction confirmed my opinion that management teams are often intimidated by the enormity of the strategy challenge. It feels so ambiguous, multi-faceted, and comprehensive that it is tough for teams to figure out how to get started on tackling it. It often feels to them as though they need to strive for the perfect answer to this tough challenge — which is intimidating. Their default is to break the big, hairy challenge into chunks — and instructing the leader of each chunk to come up with initiatives. And with that, planning wins over strategy.
The more productive alternative is to go for betterment over perfection. Make a pareto chart of your biggest problems — and solve them. If you do, you will end up with a strategy that is closer to perfection than if you seek perfection from the outset.
The Bottom Two
The following are the two least popular pieces of the year:
#52 How Management Can Most Effectively Utilize Boards: The Four Rules
This was the Year IV loser! It had very low views — 48th. And the read rate was only 28% versus the series average of 38%, which made it 51st in reads. With the low views and reads, even with a decent ratio of reads to claps (12% versus the series average of 14%), it was 51st in claps. Just pathetic.
I wouldn’t have predicted that. It was based on a thoughtful reader request — and those tend to work out a lot better than this. Plus, readers tend to like articles with things like “The Four Rules.” And I think it was reasonably well-written — though maybe not.
I think in the end that it was just too narrow. The segment of the readership population who are members of a management team that has challenges in working with its board is probably too small. Too many readers probably looked at the subject and decided to take a pass because it wasn’t going to solve a pressing problem for them.
I probably need to be more careful of reader requests. The reader might be excited, and I may get excited about the reader’s excitement — and fail to think about whether the reader is representative or atypical. Maybe I need a system for floating ideas that have been suggested. Who knows?
#51 Strategy on Rugged Landscapes: The Importance of Human Tractability
This was the Year IV runner up loser. It was actually worse than the last place piece in views (52nd) and tied for last with it in reads (51st) but it was saved by a higher rating in claps (41st). Very few readers actually viewed it, but those who did, read it at a rate closer to mean (32% versus 38%). The very interesting statistic is that if it was read, it was clapped at over two times mean (30% versus 14%). So, that small number of folks who took the time to read it, loved it — 30% is a big number, a clap/read ratio in the top 10 of 208 pieces in the series to date.
The reaction to this one was very disappointing to me, not unlike another Year IV bottom ten piece: Surfaces Concave & Convex: Contrasting Strategy Challenges. To me, each one deals with a very important strategy nuance — a critical aspect of a company’s competitive landscape. I believe fervently that you must understand these aspects of the competitive terrain to do strategy well.
The first deals with how rugged your terrain is. Are there many tall peaks atop which one can competitively stand, or just one, or a few? Are those peaks easy to identify or obscured by lower peaks? This is a super-important question.
The second deals with the terrain around your immediate position — whether it is convex or concave. If it is convex, it is inherently unstable and must be constantly managed — like the relationship between CPG companies and their retailers. If it is concave, it is self-perpetuating — like fame on TikTok or Instagram. As with ruggedness, this is important to understand when contemplating strategy choices.
I could stop doing pieces that are this subtle and nuanced. But I don’t think that is the answer. I need to make the subject more engaging and attractive. The problem isn’t reads ratio or clap ratio (a proxy for value to someone who has taken the time to read it) but very low viewership. Rugged landscapes, tractability, concave and convex just don’t cut it! I need to do better than this in Year V.
Concluding Thoughts
I am happy with Year IV of the PTW/PI series and look forward to commencing Year V. I have ranked the top five pieces and revealed the bottom two, and provided my take on the reasons why the top pieces were so popular with readers and what got in the way of the bottom two.
But what is most important is the view of readers. I would welcome any feedback, advice and commentary on Year IV and my analysis of it. Please chime in!
