Exploring key concepts in Roger Martin's book "Playing to Win"
Roger Martin's Playing to Win provides a powerful framework for making clear strategic choices that can help organizations thrive in today's competitive environment. This post explores the key concepts behind Playing to Win and how they can be effectively applied in practice to develop and execute a winning strategy.
At its core, strategy is about making deliberate choices to win in the marketplace. It involves deciding where to play and how to win, while making clear trade-offs and avoiding the trap of trying to be everything to everyone. As renowned strategy expert Richard Rumelt argues in his book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, good strategy is rare and requires focused, coordinated action based on a clear diagnosis of the challenge at hand. In contrast, bad strategy tends to be marked by fluff, buzzwords, and a failure to face the key challenges.
Effective strategy, then, is about making hard choices and saying no to certain opportunities in order to focus resources on the best path to success. This is where Roger Martin's Playing to Win framework comes in - it provides a structured approach to making those critical strategic decisions.
The Playing to Win framework is built around five essential questions that organizations must answer in order to craft a coherent and effective strategy:
By systematically working through these questions, leaders can develop a clear and actionable strategy.
The first question, "What is our winning aspiration?" is about defining the purpose and ambition of the enterprise. It's not just about financial goals, but a more holistic vision for what winning looks like. As explored in the article Crafting a Compelling Company Vision Statement: Best Practices, an effective aspiration statement paints a clear picture of the future the organization aims to create.
The next two questions, "Where will we play?" and "How will we win?" are about making the hard choices required for focused action. Organizations need to clearly define the target markets, customer segments, channels, geographies, product categories, and value propositions they will pursue - and which they will not. Trying to compete everywhere is a recipe for failure. Balancing Exploitation and Exploration in Product Strategy tackles this issue of making trade-offs between optimizing existing offerings and pursuing new opportunities for growth.
With the aspiration and strategic playing field defined, the remaining questions turn to execution. "What capabilities must we have?" asks leaders to identify and build the key strengths and skills required to deliver the strategy. These could include things like brand, technology, talent, relationships, and more. Finally, "What management systems do we need?" is about ensuring the organizational alignment, processes and routines to support strong, consistent execution.
Setting a winning aspiration is a crucial starting point in the Playing to Win process. The aspiration statement should be ambitious but achievable, expressing what winning looks like beyond just financial targets. As Crafting a Compelling Company Vision Statement: Best Practices explains, effective aspirations have several key elements:
A strong example is Microsoft's aspiration under CEO Satya Nadella to "empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more." This is bold and purpose-driven while still being directional. In contrast, a weak aspiration might be something generic like "be the best company" or an uninspiring financial goal like "grow revenue by X%." Crafting a winning aspiration sets the north star for all the strategic choices to follow.
With a clear winning aspiration in place, the next step is to make the hard choices about where to play and how to win. This means defining the specific markets, customer segments, product categories, geographies, and channels where the organization will compete. It's about focus and making deliberate choices to deploy limited resources to the areas with the best chance of success.
A useful tool for navigating these decisions is the Exploitation-Exploration matrix, which helps balance optimizing existing offerings with pursuing new growth opportunities. Exploitation is about getting the most out of the current core business, while exploration is about expanding into new territories. The key is striking the right balance and not spreading efforts too thin.
Once the playing field is defined, the question becomes how to win in the chosen spaces. This is about carving out a unique and defensible competitive position by offering a differentiated value proposition. It could be based on factors like superior technology, exceptional customer experience, lowest cost, or unique partnerships. The key is to avoid getting stuck in the mushy middle of trying to be everything to everyone.
Southwest Airlines is a great example of clear choices about where to play and how to win. They focus on short-haul flights in the US market with a no-frills service aimed at cost-conscious leisure and business travelers. Their strategy is built around operational efficiency, point-to-point routes, a standardized fleet of 737 aircraft, and an engaging brand personality. By deliberately choosing not to go head-to-head with full-service global carriers, they have carved out a profitable niche.
Delivering on the where to play and how to win choices requires identifying and building the right to win capabilities. These are the unique strengths and skills that enable the organization to deliver on its strategy better than the competition. Capabilities could include elements like:
Frito-Lay, the snack food division of PepsiCo, has built powerful capabilities in direct store delivery and merchandising. Their "front of store" capabilities in managing display inventory and gathering data at the point of sale give them a competitive edge in the crowded snack food aisles. By investing in the capabilities that matter most for their strategy, they maintain a strong position.
Notably, building capabilities often requires making trade-offs and accepting weaknesses in other areas. Few organizations can be world-class at everything. The key is to focus on the capabilities that are most critical for the chosen strategy and to build those to a high level of excellence over time.
With clear choices made about aspiration, playing field and capabilities, the final piece of the Playing to Win framework is putting in place the right management systems. This includes the structures, processes, measures and culture that enable the organization to execute the strategy effectively.
Elements of supportive management systems could include:
Patterns of Decision Architecture can play a major role in shaping how strategic decisions are made and executed. The right decision making processes and forums ensure that choices are made in a timely and aligned manner. Similarly, Psychological Safety in Crafting Strategy highlights how trust and openness within the leadership team impacts strategic dialogues. Teams need to be able to have honest, even difficult conversations to surface assumptions and debate options.
Too often, breakdowns occur not in the high-level strategic choices but in the day-to-day execution. Effective management systems ensure that the strategy comes to life in the ongoing rhythms and routines of the business. They close the gap between the big picture direction and the front line actions required to deliver results.
While the Playing to Win framework provides a clear playbook for crafting strategy, applying it is often easier said than done. Common challenges include:
Tools like the Rumsfeld Matrix can be useful for acknowledging and navigating uncertainty in the strategic decision making process. By separating out known unknowns from unknown unknowns, leaders can make informed choices while still leaving room for learning and adaptation along the way.
In today's fast-paced and competitive business environment, having a clear and focused strategy is more important than ever. Roger Martin's Playing to Win framework provides a structured approach to making the tough choices required to develop and execute a winning strategy. By systematically working through the five key questions around aspiration, playing field, winning moves, capabilities, and management systems, organizations can cut through the noise and align their efforts behind a coherent strategic direction.
Applying this framework is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing process of making deliberate choices and iterating based on results. It requires leadership commitment, cross-functional alignment, and a willingness to say no to certain opportunities in service of a focused agenda. While the challenges are real, from short-term pressures to internal resistance, the payoff of a clear strategy can be significant in terms of both financial performance and organizational health.
Crafting strategy is ultimately a creative act that blends analysis and intuition. Frameworks like Playing to Win provide guideposts, but the hard work of making choices and driving change falls to leaders. By embracing the difficult trade-offs, building the right capabilities, and shaping supportive systems, organizations can chart a path to enduring success. The invitation is to step back from the day-to-day firefighting and ask the big questions about what it will take to win in the long run.
For those looking to dive deeper into the topics explored in this post, here are some additional resources:
.png)
.png)
