Playing To Win
Through Thick & Thin
Thinking More Strategically About Where-to-Play
I had a conversation with a government official last week who doubted whether a Playing to Win strategy approach was applicable in a context like his in which there is a constraining mandate. His premise was that the set mandate rendered real strategy choice impossible. Despite me disagreeing entirely, he really liked my answer and encouraged me to write about it. So, I am doing just that in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece called Through Thick & Thin: Thinking More Strategically About Where-to-Play. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
Background
It is repeatedly asserted to me that when an organization is given a clear and strict mandate from a higher power, it can’t use the Playing to Win tool to create strategy because it must do precisely what the mandate says. I get this line most often from parts of governments, but I also get it from other kinds of non-profit organizations, and from divisions of parent companies, and even from some public companies who blame the constraints put on them by shareholders — i.e., we can’t do X because shareholders would never allow it.
It is not completely unlike pharma companies who tell me that they can’t innovate with their strategy because their product is a matter of life and death!
I get it. It is easier to blame someone else for one’s inaction: Our mandate gives us no latitude on Where-to-Play (WTP) and that severely constrains our How-to-Win (HTW), so we can’t do Playing to Win. It is a comfortable box in which to put oneself.
Lots of Opportunity
I reject the premise entirely. Every mandate I have ever encountered is so broad that strategically you can drive a proverbial Mack truck through it.
I will give an example from my time (1998–2013) as dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto (UofT). While not a government department per se, UofT is a publicly funded university controlled by the University of Toronto Act of 1906, an ancient act of the Province of Ontario which had been amended (and then only slightly) most recently in 1978. The Rotman School had a mandate from the Governing Council of UofT to run three degree programs, a Bachelor of Commerce (BCom), a Master of Business Administration (MBA) and a Doctorate in business (PhD).
The BCom was run jointly by Rotman and the Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FAS) with a mandated structure that had been in place for decades. Of the 20 courses the student had to take across the 4 years, a minimum of 6 had to be economics courses taught by FAS, with a maximum of 8, and the same minimum and maximum business courses taught by Rotman, with the remaining courses taken throughout FAS.
At that point, Rotman had the third best program in catchment area when measured by attractiveness to students. The average entering secondary school grades of Rotman students were about 7 percentage points lower than Ivey and Queens — the top two by a wide margin. I was assured that there was nothing I could do to change the management or curriculum of the BCom.
Undaunted, I did the analysis. Across the class of 300 students per year (at that time — we more than doubled the class size during my time as dean), the average number of economics courses taken was 6.00 and of business courses was 8.00. It wasn’t 6.003 economics courses, which would have been the case if one of those 300 students had taken one extra non-required economics course. It wasn’t 7.997 business courses, which would have been the case if one of those 300 students had not taken one permissible business course.
Hence, it is fair to say that the WTP/HTW for the BCom was to offer a program that students were forced to take, even though they really didn’t want it. Thus, it was attractive to students whose grades weren’t high enough to get into Ivey or Queens or who needed to live at home in Toronto to save the student residence costs. But that was our mandate — supposedly.
Instead, we surveyed students and found out (unsurprisingly) that they wished for a business program with (guess what?) more business and less economics and one that was branded Rotman, not just UofT, because we were building the Rotman brand to mean something special. But both curriculum and branding changes would require support from the dean of FAS — to, in turn, be able to go to the UofT governance hierarchy to attempt to get it to allow these changes within the application of our mandate.
The first FAS dean said no. I waited for his successor who refused as well. Neither had any interest in what students cared about or wanted. But the third dean — who happens to be the current UofT President — looked at the numbers and said: What we are doing now is nuts! Let’s do it. Bless him!
And the rest is history. We totally restructured the curriculum, it became the Rotman BCom, within a few short years the admissions gap went to zero, we doubled the size of the program due to overwhelming demand — and it is now the undisputed leader in undergraduate business education in Canada.
In one of the most bureaucratic systems in the world — a giant public university — we dramatically changed every element of the Strategy Choice Cascade. We raised our sights to a Winning Aspiration (WA), we dramatically shifted our WTP, we chose to win not play, we built new capabilities (e.g. far better professors, more student engagement, etc.), and changed management systems (e.g. completely overhauled an admissions system that had been in place for decades).
It simply isn’t true that you can’t do Playing to Win strategy in a mandate-constrained organization. Is it easy? No. Is patience required? Yes.
Of Thick and Thin
One of the underutilized levers in strategy generally, and is particularly helpful in mandate-constrained contexts, is a particular feature of WTP. Because of the word where, the first vector people tend to consider is geography — e.g., US or East Coast or Northeast or Boston. Right behind it is the product/service category — e.g., luxury watches, or laundry detergent. And then customer segment — e.g., high end, Gen Z, DINKs. A little more esoteric is go-to-market — e.g., direct to customer, exclusive distribution channel, non-exclusive distribution channel.
But an often overlooked but important feature of WTP is thick versus thin. That is, to achieve our WA and have a viable HTW, should we engage in a thick stack of activities or a thin slice of them? On the former thick front, at one point in its history Ford Motor Company owned its own rubber plantations and forests in order to make its own tires and carve its own wood trim and be in full control of every element of the vehicle — and then sell the vehicles directly to the end customer. On the latter thin front, modern Ford is now an assembler of other companies’ components and sells through a dealership network.
Sometimes, picking a very thin slice — Intel in logic chips and Microsoft in PC operating systems — is the road to great riches rather than a thicker slice — IBM in PC design, manufacturing, and distribution. Other times — Apple iPhone — choosing a thicker slice (integrated hardware and software) is the key to glory.
Regardless of the eventual thickness or thinness, it is a super-important aspect of the WTP choice. Despite the importance, it is often an implicit choice — typically to pick the thickness or thinness of competition generally. For example, the logic tends to be, my apparel competitors sell through apparel retailers so we should too. Less often it is my apparel competitors sell through wholesale distribution, so we might be able to get an advantage by going direct-to-consumer.
This is a particularly helpful strategy lever to pull in the mandate context discussed above. You may have a mandate to make certain that a desired outcome is produced. But typically, you have a wide latitude to do it in a manner of your choice. I framed it that way for the government agency person mentioned in the opening and he agreed that he had wide latitude on how he achieved his assigned mandate.
I helped another non-profit organization achieve its mandate better by thinning out its WTP. It is the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (Sick Kids, as it is called), which is routinely ranked in the top 3 pediatric hospitals in the world. The provinces have jurisdiction over health care in Canada, so Sick Kids had the mandate to be Ontario’s only quaternary pediatric hospital and its biggest tertiary pediatric hospital, and the single pediatric hospital serving Ontario’s dominant metropolitan area with half the province’s population.
I was a member of its Board of Trustees for ten years (2000–2009) and chaired the quality safety committee. While Sick Kids was a truly outstanding hospital — in many ways the pride of all Canada and recognized for excellence globally — we struggled in two medical disciplines, rehabilitation and psychiatry.
The rehab discipline is quite distinctive from most of the other medical disciplines in a pediatric hospital and requires very specialized physical infrastructure — like swimming pools, saunas, etc. While we thought — because of the overall excellence of Sick Kids — that we are great at rehab, and we did have lots to offer in research and innovation, in fact, we were subscale and were never going to make it an important specialty. But there was a children’s rehab center in Toronto, Holland Bloorview (Bloorview MacMillan at the time) that did nothing but children’s rehab — and at scale. It didn’t have the world-class research chops of Sick Kids, but it had excellence in ways we didn’t.
The Chair and the CEO asked me to be the board leader of discussions on collaborating with Bloorview. While collaborating in that way was counter cultural for Sick Kids, in due course, the doctors there came to realize that if we thinned down the set of activities Sick Kids performed and partnered with Bloorview to jointly rehab kids leveraging Bloorview’s fantastic infrastructure and intensely focused staff, we could dramatically improve service to the children without increasing costs.
Later we did the same thing in psychiatry with Toronto’s outstanding Center for Addiction and Mental Health. The approach to thinning was uniquely customized to that discipline but had an equally beneficial impact on patient care. In both cases, nothing whatsoever changed with the mandate. We just made thinner and more precise WTP choices to fulfil the mandate far better than before.
Practitioner Insights
I have seen many situations in which an organization has a mandate imposed on it from above (or sometimes from the past). But I have never seen a case in which clever strategy choices can’t result in better performance against the mandate. Never let a mandate neuter your ability to manipulate the levers of strategy to generate a better outcome — one that better fulfils your mandate if you have been given one.
And always, whether or not an imposed mandate presents a challenge, remember the less obvious element of WTP — thickness or thinness. Start by making explicit your current choice on this dimension. Often it is implicit, so reverse-engineer and characterize the status quo — understanding it is a prerequisite to modifying it.
Then ask, in what ways might I be able to thicken our WTP to strengthen our HTW and improve our chances of meeting our WA (and/or mandate)? Then do the same exercise on thinning our WTP.
My experience is that whether by thickening or thinning — and frankly more likely the latter — you will find a way to improve your strategy.
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As a reminder, I am doing a PTW/PI podcast series with friend Tiffani Bova. The seventh in the series will be on LinkedIn here on Wednesday, June 4th at 12 noon EST and 9am PST. I look forward to seeing you there.
