Playing to Win How Strategy Really Works Book Review

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Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

Playing to Win is a book that is co-written by two individuals who have vast knowledge and expertise regarding management. A. G. Lafely is the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, while on the other hand, Roger Martin has been the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. To be specific, the book employs Procter & Gamble as a full and comprehensive case study on strategy. Playing to Win clearly points out the strategic method that Lafely, in close affiliation with Roger Martin, who acted as his strategic adviser, employed to increase the sales of P&G twice over, increasing the profits of the company fourfold and also the market value of the company by over $100 billion. This was when Lafely first became CEO of the company, as he led P&G between the years 2000 and 2009. Playing to Win points out to leaders in any sort of establishment, the approach in which they can direct day-to-day activities and actions with greater strategic objectives constructed around the clear, vital components that decide business achievement basically, where the establishment ought to play and how to win.

Application

Playing to Win, is strongly tied to the notion of consumer capitalism. The key principle of the book is that economic profit will stream to stockholders only if the corporation picks out a clear group of consumers to address and discovers a way to generate unique value for them. Lafley and Martin point out that value does not just pour to stockholders, but is centered on some intangible aspiration to maximize the value of the shareholders. Proctor & Gamble is a proper illustration of consumer capitalism in the sense that the whole organizational culture of the company is based on the idea that delighting clients, that is making their lives slightly better each day, is the top and leading priority of the corporation. All good aspects emanate from satisfying and addressing consumers (Denning, 2013).

Lafley and Martin (2013) proclaim that strategy is a new and fledgling discipline, in that, it is about making particular choices in one's business. Leaders in companies, according to the two authors, commit five types of mistakes and errors when planning and designing their strategies. The first one is that leaders outline strategy only as a vision. According to Lafley and Martin (2013), mission and vision statements are aspects of strategy, but they are not adequate or sufficient. They do not offer any guide to fecund or dynamic action and no unequivocal road map to the sought after future. The second mistake is that leaders describe strategy merely as a plan. Third of all, leaders repudiate that long standing or even medium term strategy is conceivable for the reason that this is a world that is rapidly and incessantly changing. The fourth mistake is that leaders describe strategy as the optimization of what they are presently undertaking in their prevailing business. Last of all, as pointed out by Lafley and Martin (2013), leaders define strategy as ensuing best practices, for instance, benchmarking against competition, and thereafter, doing the similar set of activities (Lafley and Martin, 2013).

According to Lafley and Martin (2013), any manager in any organization, equipped with a delineation of strategy as choice, the strategy choice cascade and the strategic choice arranging practice, can construct dominant strategies. The authors assert that the process is constructed on a set of five incorporated choices. Lafley and Martin (2013) assert that these choices and the association between them can be comprehended as a strengthening cascade, with the choices at the uppermost of the cascade instituting the perspective for the choice, and the selections at the bottom, swaying and filtering the choices. Lafley and Martin (2013) employs examples of the value of strategic thinking by means of their experience in Procter and Gamble. As illustrated in the first chapter in the book, the authors point out the manner in which they fortify Oil and Clay, a high profile product, festering in a commercial and mounting marketplace (DeBois, 2013).

The two authors recommend a playbook of five steps to be taken to a strategy. The first step encompasses deciding on a winning aspiration. This choice alludes to the purpose of the enterprise. In this case, for Oil of Olay, as illustrated, was to grow into a leading skin care brand once again. Once a company ascertains the principle of a clear, but thought-provoking aspiration, the twofold decisions of where to play and how to win are taken into consideration in the third and fourth chapters.

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The aspect of where to play takes into account more than just geography, encompassing the type of product, whether luxury or value, consumer segments, channels of distribution and vertical integration. According to Lafley and Martin (2013), a losing choice is one which tries to serve every individual at every place. Lafley and Martin (2013) construct lengthily and comprehensively from Michael Porter's work and display that there are only two winning strategies, and these are differentiation and cost leadership. Unquestionably, cost leadership, that is, being the lowest cost producer and distributor, results in new competition, as technology permits enhanced production representations. Differentiation necessitates making decisions on what value will be distributed to which consumer segments and the manner in which the organization delivers value above and further than the competition and rival establishments (Lafley and Martin, 2013).

The second step is choosing "where to play," which is basically the market for the product offering. This second choice ascertains and pinpoints precisely where the product or the company will compete. In particular, the brand of Oil of Olay stayed with its mass-market retailers, for instance, Walmart and Target, instead of the high-end stores, such as Macy's. However, it placed itself as a "masstige" product, which is higher end compared to the conventional mass-market beauty product (Soundview, 2013).

The third step to a strategy is deciding on "how to win," which is basically executing strategy. This perspective is taken into consideration with a clear value proposal or plan, and a path to competitive edge or strong suit. Amongst Oil of Olay's winning strategies was generating a superior anti-aging skin care product, which retailed at the right place, appealing to the esteem consumer base. The fourth step is developing core capabilities. The main task to be undertaken in this step is to describe and outline the activities and proficiencies that support the choice of where to play and how to win. For instance, Oil of Olay has the capability of leveraging P&G's strong suits in consumer understanding and brand building. The final step is creating or forming a management system. Strategists ought to define the structures, systems and measures necessitated to offer backing for the choices. In this case, Oil of Olay was capable of leveraging P&G's systems in addition to its network and partner systems. This context and structure can be applied at all levels of the corporation, comprising the organization level, strategic group, or a single business unit. As pointed out by Lafley and Martin (2013), the choices need to support each other amongst the dissimilar levels.

According to Soundview (2013), whereas a great deal of the book is devoted to the five-choice context or structure, Lafley and Martin provide two extra components to support the strategic choice procedure and practice. The first is a well-thought-out approach and method for analyzing the company, especially the industry in which it is set in, customers, comparative position to rivals and the potential competitor reaction to their strategic choices (Soundview, 2013). In addition, the two authors also provide a reverse engineering practice to test potential strategic selections (Lafley and Martin, 2013).

According to Denning (2013), P&G has several successful brands. One aspect to consider is whether this sort of approach used by P&G is a drawback for establishing genuine trust from the consumers. In essence, this considers whether consumers can trust Olay, Tide or Crest. This approach is compared to the aspect of whether the consumers have to know more regarding the company behind those brands and its values and the manner in which it operates or not. According to Denning (2013), both of these approaches obviously function in the realm of brands. For instance, Apple Inc. has one brand while P&G has several. P&G has the belief that consumers do completely trust Olay, Crest and Tide, and this is clearly indicated from the data. The main benefit is that every brand can be developed, imagining that it is completely autonomous and personalized to the specific consumer experience (Denning, 2013). Subsequent to reading Playing to Win, there are key lessons from P&G's experiences that can be learnt for other companies. Some of these lessons include: devotion to intensive brand building, deep consumer understanding and incessant investment in innovation, together with the creation of a global and international scale. However, the authors emphasize on the promotion within the organizational culture.

Evaluation

The book can be rated as a 4.5 and is very….....

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