"Two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy—explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point.

A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success— where to play and how to win .

The result is a playbook for winning. Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors. They are:

• What is our winning aspiration?
• Where will we play?
• How will we win?
• What capabilities must we have in place to win?
• What management systems are required to support our choices?

The stories of how P&G repeatedly won by applying this method to iconic brands such as Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze clearly illustrate how deciding on a strategic approach—and then making the right choices to support it—makes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning."

- Good Reads review at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13586928-playing-to-win?from_search=true&amp...

This book is known as a classics on strategic planning and the role of strategy in business. It speaks from the point of view of leadership over Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) numerous businesses. The company identified its organization to be weak in understanding strategy, and it sought to inculcate strategic thinking into its leadership. Although this book references a few other corporations, it consists largely of case studies around how P&G succeeded using strategy.

The authors divide strategy into two central questions: Where to play, and how to win? The first question is often overlooked in meeting rooms. Deciding what consumers to target can provide a make-or-break decision concerning whether a product will succeed. The authors then break down these two central questions into sub-questions with cases to illustrate insights.

The book tries to identify general principles based on P&G’s experiences. One author was the CEO, and the other was a paid consultant to the company. Both were intimately involved in P&G’s refashioned approach to the market and in its numerous successes and occasional failures. The book’s main weakness lies in its magnified focus on and access to P&G. I would like to have heard a critical analysis of other ventures’ strategic plans, especially in my fields of healthcare and technology. That is probably too much to want from one treatment.

This book portrays a relentless focus on “winning.” In the field of healthcare technology, this verbiage can repel and appear difficult. My workplace does not talk about “wins” as much (though we occasionally talk so); we more often use language of fulfilling “goals.” Still, I remained able to abstract the point, but the authors’ bias towards a game-centered view of the world, with winners and losers, was apparent throughout.

This book’s audience consists of business folk, especially at more leadership levels. It’s reputed to be one of the best looks on strategy in the literature. I can see why. Although a scientist, I found its wording fairly accessible although I found it voyaged into jargon occasionally. Someone need not be an expert to learn from this book. ( )

Took a while. Surprisingly it gets more clever in the end! As it is fifty % written by a former P&G CEO you should not wonder that most of the examples are out of the P&G universe. Sadly some of the FMCG brands are not known to the typical European like me. ( )