Playing to Win – Complete Book Summary & All Key Ideas

Playing to Win: A Complete Guide to How Strategy Really Works

Quick Orientation

Playing to Win is a practical business strategy framework that demystifies corporate strategy by focusing on five essential choices organizations must make to dominate their markets. This book rejects abstract strategic planning in favor of a simple, repeatable methodology centered on making clear decisions to win in the marketplace.

The framework argues that strategy isn’t about elaborate visions or complex plans—it’s a disciplined approach to choosing where to compete, how to win, and what capabilities are needed for success. Drawing from a dramatic corporate turnaround case study, the book provides actionable tools for leaders who want to move beyond just competing to actually dominating their industries.

Playing to Win contends that too many leaders avoid making tough strategic choices, settling for mediocrity instead of focused plans for victory. The book presents a comprehensive playbook with analytical tools, decision-making processes, and team-based methods for creating and executing winning strategies. This approach works for organizations of any size, from global corporations to small startups, offering a proven methodology that replaces guesswork with strategic clarity and measurable results.

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Chapter One: Strategy Is Choice

This chapter introduces the core argument of the book: strategy is choice. It’s not a vision, a plan, or an optimization of the status quo. It’s an integrated set of five specific choices that position a company to win. The authors use the stunning turnaround of P&G’s Olay brand to illustrate how these choices work in practice.

The Problem with Olay and the Power of Choice

In the late 1990s, Oil of Olay was a struggling, outdated brand derisively known as “Oil of Old Lady.” With sales below $800 million, it was a weak link in P&G’s beauty portfolio. The team faced a difficult strategic choice: let the brand die, acquire a competitor, or attempt a risky reinvention. They chose to reinvent, starting with a fundamental question: how can we win?

The Olay team made a series of integrated choices. They rechristened the brand “Olay” and targeted a new consumer segment: women aged 35 and up who were just beginning to see signs of aging. Instead of competing on price alone, they decided to create a new “masstige” (mass-prestige) category. This meant developing a technologically superior product that could fight the “seven signs of aging,” packaging it like a high-end cream, and selling it in mass-market stores like Walgreens and Target, but at a premium price point of $18.99—a price that signaled value to prestige shoppers and superior quality to mass shoppers. This new strategy transformed Olay into a $2.5 billion brand and a leader in skin care.

The Five Choices of the Strategic Choice Cascade

The Olay story demonstrates the book’s central framework: the Strategic Choice Cascade. Strategy is the answer to five interconnected questions that flow from one to the next, with choices at the top setting the context for choices below, and choices at the bottom influencing and refining those above.

The five choices are:

What is your winning aspiration? This defines the purpose of your enterprise and its guiding mission. It’s about winning, not just participating.
Where will you play? This narrows the competitive field by defining the markets, customer segments, channels, product categories, and geographies where you will compete.
How will you win? This defines your competitive advantage. It’s the way you will create unique value for customers on your chosen playing field.
What capabilities must be in place? These are the core competencies and activities that are essential to support your where-to-play and how-to-win choices.
What management systems are required? These are the systems, structures, and measures that foster and support the strategic choices, ensuring they are executed effectively.

Nested Cascades and the Role of Everyone

Strategy isn’t just for the C-suite. The choice cascade is a nested framework that applies at every level of an organization. A company has a corporate-level strategy, which informs the strategy for a business sector (e.g., beauty), which in turn informs the strategy for a category (e.g., skin care), and finally a brand (e.g., Olay). Even a frontline salesperson has a strategy for how she wins with her customers each day. The choices made at each level must align with and reinforce the choices made above and below.

This chapter sets the stage by arguing that strategy can be demystified. By answering these five questions, any leader can create a clear, actionable, and sustainable strategy. It’s an iterative process that requires tough thinking and real commitment, but it provides a clear path to winning.

Chapter Two: What Is Winning

A lofty mission statement isn’t a strategy. To be effective, an organization’s purpose must be translated into a winning aspiration. This chapter explains why the ambition to win is the crucial starting point for any strategy and how to define what winning looks like.

Playing to Win vs. Playing to Play

The single most important dimension of a company’s aspiration is that it must play to win. A modest aspiration is more dangerous than a lofty one, because it leads to mediocrity and an unwillingness to make the tough choices and investments required for victory.

The authors contrast two examples:

Playing to Play: General Motors’ Saturn. In the 1990s, GM launched Saturn as a defensive move to compete with Japanese imports in the small-car market. The goal was simply to participate and “still make money.” GM’s competitors—Toyota, Honda, and Nissan—aspired to win that segment. Saturn ultimately failed because its aspiration was too modest to justify the sustained investment needed to keep up with competitors who were playing to win.
Playing to Win: P&G’s Global Business Services (GBS). In the early 2000s, P&G’s internal IT and services unit, GBS, faced a choice: maintain the status quo, spin off, or outsource everything to a single provider. None of these options was framed around winning. Filippo Passerini, the head of GBS, reframed the goal to ask: how can GBS create a sustainable competitive advantage for P&G? The answer was a “best-of-breed” outsourcing strategy. Instead of a single partner, GBS partnered with multiple best-in-class providers (like HP and IBM) in a way that made P&G an indispensable client. This freed up GBS to focus on high-value, strategic innovations for P&G. The desire to win spurred a creative, value-creating solution.

Winning with Those Who Matter Most

To define a winning aspiration, you must be clear about who you are winning with and against.

First, win with the people who matter most: your consumers. Companies often suffer from marketing myopia, defining their business by the products they make (e.g., “we make smartphones”) rather than the consumer need they meet (e.g., “we connect people”). A powerful aspiration is always centered on the consumer, not the product. P&G’s home-care business doesn’t aspire to make the strongest cleanser; it aspires to “reinvent cleaning experiences” and take the hard work out of chores. This consumer-centric view leads to game-changing products like Swiffer and Febreze.

Second, define winning against the very best competition. Don’t just look at your traditional rivals. Identify the best competitor in your space, even if they are small or local, and ask what they are doing better than you. P&G’s home-care team, for example, learned valuable lessons by studying the performance of a smaller but highly effective competitor, Reckitt-Benckiser.

This chapter establishes that a winning aspiration is the anchor for the entire strategy. It provides the context and motivation for the subsequent choices. Without an explicit desire to win, a company is unlikely to invest the resources needed to create a sustainable advantage.

Chapter Three: Where to Play

Strategy is about focus. The “where to play” choice narrows the competitive field and defines the specific arena where you will compete. This chapter breaks down the different dimensions of this choice and warns against the common temptations that lead to weak strategies.

The Bounty Story: Choosing the Right Playing Field

For decades, Bounty was a leading paper towel brand in North America. By the late 1990s, however, a misguided global expansion had drained resources from its core market. The business was structurally unattractive in most of the world due to overcapacity and the dominance of private-label brands. The new family-care leader, Charlie Pierce, made a critical where-to-play choice: focus only on North America, where the business could be profitable and a leader.

With geography decided, the team focused on consumer segments. They discovered three distinct types of paper towel users:

Those who valued a balance of strength and absorbency (Bounty’s core users).
Those who wanted a soft, cloth-like feel.
Those who prioritized strength at a value price.

Bounty was only winning with the first group. To win across a broader field, P&G decided to play in all three segments. It kept the original Bounty for its core users, launched Bounty Extra Soft for the second segment, and created Bounty Basic—a stronger-than-average value towel—for the third. This clear segmentation allowed Bounty to dominate the premium end of the market by tailoring its offerings to specific consumer needs.

The Five Dimensions of Where to Play

The Bounty example illustrates that “where to play” is a multifaceted choice. Leaders must make conscious decisions across five key domains:

Geography: In which countries or regions will you compete?
Product Type: What products and services will you offer?
Consumer Segment: Which groups of consumers will you target? At what price tier?
Distribution Channel: How will you reach your customers (e.g., online, mass-market, specialty stores)?
Vertical Stage of Production: In which parts of the value chain will you participate?

Three Dangerous Temptations to Avoid

In making where-to-play choices, leaders often fall into one of three traps:

Failing to Choose: Trying to be all things to all people results in underserving everyone. Even Apple doesn’t serve all markets equally. A choice to serve “everyone” is a losing choice.
Trying to Buy Your Way Out: Acquiring a company in a more attractive industry rarely works. A firm unable to win in its current game is unlikely to win in a new one, especially since attractive assets are expensive and often require entirely different capabilities.
Accepting an Existing Choice as Immutable: Don’t assume your current playing field is fixed. Olay shifted its consumer focus, Tide broadened its product definition from “laundry detergent” to “laundry care,” and Thomson Corporation transformed itself from a newspaper and oil company into a digital information provider (Thomson Reuters). You always have a choice.

The chapter concludes by highlighting the power of imagination. P&G’s fine-fragrance business was an accidental acquisition that seemed like a poor fit. But by reframing where to play—focusing on less-contested segments like men’s fragrances first—and leveraging P&G’s core capabilities, the company built it into a world-leading, multi-billion-dollar business. A clear where-to-play choice creates focus and sets the stage for determining how you will win.

Chapter Four: How to Win

Choosing where you’ll compete is only half the battle. The “how to win” choice defines your recipe for success on that playing field. It’s about creating a better value equation for your customers than your competitors can, and doing so sustainably.

The Glad Story: Innovating How You Win

P&G labs developed two breakthrough technologies: a super-stretchy trash bag film (ForceFlex) and a self-sealing food wrap (Impress). Launching these products would mean entering a market dominated by powerful competitors like Clorox (Glad) and SC Johnson (Saran Wrap), who would fight ferociously. P&G remembered the painful failure of its Citrus Hill orange juice, which was crushed by entrenched competitors Minute Maid and Tropicana despite its superior technology.

Instead of launching a head-on attack, the P&G team, led by Jeff Weedman, explored a different way to win. They considered licensing the technology but received an even more intriguing pitch from Clorox: a joint venture. P&G would provide the technology and R&D expertise, while Clorox would handle manufacturing, marketing, and sales of the Glad brand. P&G would receive a 20% stake in the newly fortified Glad business. This innovative business model allowed P&G to win without a costly market war. It leveraged P&G’s strength in innovation and Clorox’s strength in the category, turning Glad into a billion-dollar brand and creating value for both companies.

The Two Fundamental Ways to Win

As first articulated by Michael Porter, there are only two generic ways to create a sustainable competitive advantage:

Cost Leadership: A company wins by having a lower cost structure than its competitors. It doesn’t necessarily have the lowest price, but the lower costs give it a greater margin. This advantage can be used to underprice competitors or to reinvest in other areas (like marketing or shelf space) to reinforce its position. There can only be one true low-cost leader in an industry.
Differentiation: A company wins by offering a product or service that is perceived as distinctively more valuable to customers, allowing it to command a price premium. This differentiation can be based on brand, quality, design, or customer service. The goal is to create a unique offering that a specific group of customers is willing to pay more for.

P&G almost always competes through branded differentiation. It aims to create products that consumers value more highly, allowing it to earn a price premium.

Finding Your Unique Way to Win

Within these two broad strategies, there are countless ways to win. The key is to find a how-to-win approach that is tailored to your specific context and reinforces your where-to-play choice. For example, the Gain laundry detergent team found a new way to win against the dominant Tide brand. While Tide owned the “all-purpose cleaning” position, Gain repositioned itself to serve a passionate niche of “scent seekers.” It won by differentiating on the sensory experience of laundry, a dimension competitors had overlooked.

Similarly, the Febreze team avoided a direct fight in the crowded air freshener category. They introduced their odor-eliminating technology as a laundry additive first, then as a refresher for fabrics, and only later as an air deodorizer. They attacked along the line of least resistance, building a powerful brand before taking on incumbents directly. These examples show that winning often requires creative, integrated where-to-play and how-to-win choices. A diaper that is too expensive for emerging markets, for instance, requires both a where-to-play choice (Asia) and a how-to-win choice (designing a diaper from scratch to meet local needs at an affordable price, rather than just stripping features from a premium product).

The heart of strategy lies in the mutually reinforcing combination of where you play and how you win there. These choices must be considered together to create a powerful, integrated approach that sets you apart from the competition.

Chapter Five: Play to Your Strengths

A brilliant strategy is useless without the ability to execute it. This chapter focuses on core capabilities—the unique strengths and activities that allow a company to bring its where-to-play and how-to-win choices to life. These capabilities must be cultivated and configured into a system that creates a durable competitive advantage.

The Gillette Acquisition: A Merger of Capabilities

P&G’s 2005 acquisition of Gillette was a massive success in an era of value-destroying mergers. The reason? A deep strategic fit built on reinforcing capabilities. The deal wasn’t just about combining brands; it was about whether P&G could be a better owner of Gillette by bringing its core capabilities to the table.

Gillette’s brands (Mach 3, Venus) were a perfect fit with P&G’s where-to-play choice to grow in beauty and personal care. More importantly, the two companies’ capabilities aligned. Both were masters of brand building and product innovation. P&G brought its strengths to Gillette, particularly in deep consumer understanding. Chip Bergh, who led the integration, sent the Gillette innovation team to India to live with consumers and truly understand how they shaved. This led to the creation of the Gillette Guard, a razor designed from scratch for the needs of Indian men, which became a massive success. In return, Gillette brought its world-class product launch and in-store merchandising capabilities to P&G. The merger worked because the companies’ strengths were complementary and mutually reinforcing.

The Activity System: Mapping Your Path to Victory

Core capabilities don’t exist in isolation; they work together in what Michael Porter calls an activity system. This is a visual map of the tailored activities that create and sustain a company’s competitive advantage. The goal is to create a system where the activities are not only consistent but also reinforce one another, making the whole system stronger than the sum of its parts.

P&G identified five core capabilities that form its activity system:

Deep Consumer Understanding: Knowing consumers better than any competitor and uncovering their unarticulated needs.
Innovation: Translating consumer understanding into a constant stream of new and improved products, packages, and business models.
Brand Building: Creating and nurturing brands that offer powerful value and command long-term loyalty.
Go-to-Market Ability: Building unique partnerships with retailers to win at the point of sale.
Global Scale: Leveraging size to maximize buying power, share learnings, and re-apply successes globally.

This system is distinctive and defensible. While a competitor might match one capability (e.g., L’Oréal’s branding), none can easily replicate the entire integrated system.

Reinforcing Rods in a Multi-Level Strategy

In a large company, different business units will have their own unique activity systems. However, for the corporation to create more value than the individual units could on their own, there must be common capabilities that run through the organization like reinforcing rods in a concrete building. These shared strengths, like P&G’s consumer understanding or global scale, tie the different parts of the company together and provide a competitive advantage to each business unit.

The success of the Gillette acquisition was due to these reinforcing rods. P&G’s capabilities in consumer research, go-to-market execution, and global scale drove powerfully through Gillette’s business, making it stronger and more profitable than it could have been alone. When choosing where to play, a company should focus on businesses that can benefit from its existing reinforcing rods.

This chapter emphasizes that strategy is not just about abstract choices, but about building and leveraging a tangible set of strengths. By identifying the core capabilities needed to win and organizing them into a coherent activity system, a company can turn its strategic intent into a reality.

Chapter Six: Manage What Matters

A great strategy can still fail if it’s not supported by the right management systems. This final element of the choice cascade includes the structures, processes, and measures that bring a strategy to life and ensure it is executed effectively. This chapter explains how to build systems that support choices, foster capabilities, and track progress toward winning.

From Corporate Theater to Strategic Dialogue

P&G transformed its strategy review process from what leaders called “corporate theater” into a genuine strategic dialogue. In the old system, brand managers came to meetings with huge binders, ready to defend a pre-baked plan and “get out alive” without being humiliated by the CEO. The goal was to talk about anything but the real strategic challenges.

The new system fostered a collaborative, inquiry-based approach. The key changes included:

No Presentations, Only Dialogue: Meetings focused on a few critical strategic issues agreed upon in advance. Formal presentations were banned.
Smaller Groups: The audience was cut from twenty-five people to a small group of relevant leaders.
Assertive Inquiry: Leaders were coached to use a communication style that balances advocacy (“Here is my view and why”) with inquiry (“To what extent do you see it differently?”). This shifted the culture from defending positions to collaboratively solving problems.

This new management system was designed to build the strategic capabilities of leaders throughout the company. The goal was to make everyone a better strategist, capable of making tough choices in real time.

Systems to Support Core Capabilities and Communicate Strategy

Organizations need systems that explicitly nurture their core strengths. P&G created formal systems to support each of its five core capabilities. For example, to strengthen brand building, the company codified its approach into a Brand Building Framework (BBF) that could be taught and replicated. To leverage scale, it consolidated global purchasing and created new models to measure overhead efficiency.

Communicating the strategy is also a critical system. Instead of complex PowerPoint decks, leadership distilled the corporate strategy into three simple, memorable themes that everyone could understand and act on:

Make the consumer the boss.
Win the consumer value equation.
Win the two most important moments of truth: the first moment when a consumer sees the product on the shelf, and the second moment when they use it at home.

Measuring What Matters

What gets measured gets done. To be effective, a strategy needs specific measures that track progress toward its goals. P&G shifted from measuring market-based Total Shareholder Return (TSR), which is influenced by factors outside a manager’s control, to Operating TSR. This internal metric combines sales growth, profit margin improvement, and capital efficiency—three things business leaders can directly influence.

P&G also developed new consumer-focused metrics like Weighted Purchase Intent (WPI). Instead of just measuring a diaper’s technical absorbency, the WPI metric captured the holistic value equation from a mother’s perspective, including aesthetics, feel, and brand perception. This led to a more complete understanding of what drives consumer preference and helped the baby-care business win back market leadership.

This chapter drives home the point that strategy is not a “set it and forget it” exercise. It requires a set of reinforcing management systems to create a rhythm of dialogue, support core capabilities, communicate clear intent, and measure what truly matters for winning. Without them, even the best strategy is just a wish list.

Chapter Seven: Think Through Strategy

Making strategic choices can feel overwhelming. There’s an infinite amount of data to analyze and countless tools to use. This chapter provides a structured way to think through the complexities of your environment and generate sound where-to-play and how-to-win choices. The authors introduce the Strategy Logic Flow, a framework that organizes analysis around four key dimensions.

The Strategy Logic Flow Framework

The Strategy Logic Flow is a series of seven questions across four analytical categories that guide your thinking from the broad industry landscape down to specific competitive reactions. While the flow is generally from left to right, it’s an iterative process that requires moving back and forth between the components.

The four dimensions are:

Industry Analysis: What is the structure of your industry and the attractiveness of its segments?
Customers: What do your channel and end customers truly value?
Relative Position: How do your capabilities and costs stack up against the competition?
Competition: How will your competitors react to your choices?

1. Industry Analysis: Understanding the Playing Field

This analysis starts with segmentation. Don’t just accept the traditional industry map. Look for new ways to segment the market based on geography, consumer needs, or channels. For years, the toothpaste industry was segmented by a single benefit: cavity prevention. Colgate seized market leadership by creating a new, broader “healthy mouth” segment with Colgate Total. P&G’s Crest had to fundamentally rethink the industry map to compete, launching products for whitening, sensitivity, and even different flavor experiences.

Once you’ve mapped the segments, you must assess their structural attractiveness using Michael Porter’s Five Forces framework. This tool helps you understand the profit potential of a segment by analyzing the power of buyers and suppliers, the threat of new entrants and substitutes, and the intensity of rivalry among existing players. This analysis helps you identify where to play in segments where you can create and capture the most value.

2. Customer Value Analysis: Finding the “Why”

This step involves digging deep to understand what your customers—both the channel (e.g., retailers) and the end consumers—truly value. For channel customers like Walmart, value might be driven by profit margins, traffic generation, and supply chain efficiency. For end consumers, value is often tied to unarticulated needs. You can’t just ask them what they want; as Henry Ford quipped, they would have asked for a “faster horse.”

P&G learned this with its diapers. The company was obsessed with the technical metric of absorbency, but deep ethnographic research revealed that mothers also cared deeply about softness, a snug fit, and even fun designs on the diaper. Understanding this complete value equation is essential for creating a winning offering.

3. Analysis of Relative Position: Sizing Up Yourself

With an understanding of the industry and your customers, you must now look inward. Assess your capabilities and costs relative to your best competitors. Can your capabilities be configured to deliver value in a distinctive way (a differentiation strategy)? Or can you deliver a similar offering at a lower cost (a cost leadership strategy)? This analysis helps you ground your strategic possibilities in reality. P&G exited the pharmaceutical business because it realized its core capabilities in mass-market branding and consumer influence were not a good fit for an industry driven by clinical trials and relationships with doctors.

4. Competitive Analysis: Predicting the Countermove

Finally, you must analyze how your competitors will likely react to your choices. A strategy that only works if your rivals do nothing is a dangerous one. Before P&G launched its concentrated Joy dish soap in Japan against two powerful incumbents, the team modeled the likely competitive responses. They concluded that the competitors would be slow to abandon their existing, profitable product lines, giving Joy a crucial window to establish a foothold. Thinking through competitive reactions helps you build a strategy that is not just attractive, but also robust and defensible.

The Strategy Logic Flow provides a structured path for analysis, moving from broad industry dynamics to the specific actions of your rivals. It helps you organize your thinking and generate a set of thoughtful, well-grounded strategic possibilities.

Chapter Eight: Shorten Your Odds

Strategy is not about finding a single, perfect answer; it’s about making the best possible choice under conditions of uncertainty. This chapter presents a powerful, counterintuitive process for making strategic choices as a team. Instead of starting with data and building a case, this approach—called reverse engineering—starts with possibilities and works backward to discover the best path forward.

The Problem with the Traditional “Buy-In” Approach

The typical strategy process is broken. A team analyzes massive amounts of data, generates a few “practical” options, argues over which is best, and then tries to sell a compromised solution to senior management. This process is slow, expensive, stifles creativity, and often results in weak choices and passive resistance from those who never truly bought in. It creates unproductive conflict as people defend their pet options.

Reverse Engineering: Asking “What Would Have to Be True?”

The reverse engineering process flips the traditional model on its head by asking a single, transformative question: “What would have to be true for this possibility to be a fantastic choice?” This shifts the conversation from arguing about what is true to collaboratively exploring the logic behind different options.

The process has seven steps:

Frame the Choice: Articulate the problem as a choice between at least two mutually exclusive options. This makes the stakes real and motivates the team to find a resolution.
Generate Strategic Possibilities: Brainstorm a broad range of potential where-to-play and how-to-win combinations. At this stage, be inclusive and encourage creative, even wild, ideas.
Specify Conditions: For each possibility, work backward to list all the conditions that would have to be true across the Strategy Logic Flow for it to be a winning choice. The goal here is not to debate the conditions, but simply to articulate the logic.
Identify Barriers to Choice: Now, look at your list of conditions and identify the one or two that the team is most skeptical about—the ones you believe are least likely to be true. These are your critical barriers.
Design Valid Tests: Design tests specifically to assess your barrier conditions. Crucially, the person most skeptical about a condition should be the one to design the test. If they are satisfied with the test’s rigor and results, everyone else will be too.
Conduct Tests: Test the biggest barrier first. If a possibility fails its most critical test, you can discard it without wasting time and resources testing the other conditions. This “lazy person’s approach” focuses analysis where it matters most.
Choose: After the tests are complete, the choice often becomes simple and even anticlimactic. The results speak for themselves, and the team can move forward with a single, robust strategy that everyone understands and is committed to.

This reverse engineering process turns strategy from a political battle into a collaborative search for the best answer. It surfaces and resolves disagreements productively, leading to stronger choices and genuine alignment.

Key Takeaways

Playing to Win provides a clear, actionable playbook for any leader who wants to move beyond simply competing and start winning.

The Core Lessons:

Strategy is a set of integrated choices. It’s the answer to five questions: what is our winning aspiration, where will we play, how will we win, what capabilities do we need, and what management systems must be in place?
Winning must be the goal. A modest aspiration is a recipe for mediocrity. Define winning with your consumers and against your best competitors.
Focus is power. You must choose where you will play and, just as importantly, where you will not. You cannot be all things to all people.
There are only two ways to win. You can either have a lower cost structure than competitors (cost leadership) or offer a distinctively more valuable product that commands a price premium (differentiation).
Build an integrated system of capabilities. Your competitive advantage comes not from a single strength, but from a mutually reinforcing set of activities that is difficult for competitors to replicate.
Ask “What would have to be true?” To make better choices, work backward from possibilities to identify the critical conditions for success, and then test the barriers that stand in your way.

Next Actions:

Assemble your team and start the conversation. Use the five questions of the Strategic Choice Cascade to frame your current strategy. Is it clear? Is it a choice?
Map your current activity system. What are your true core capabilities? How do they support your where-to-play and how-to-win choices? How do they compare to your competitors’?
Identify your most pressing strategic challenge and frame it as a choice. Use the reverse engineering process to explore possibilities and identify the critical barriers you need to test. Don’t start with a massive data-gathering exercise; start by asking the right questions.

Reflection Prompts:

If we are honest with ourselves, are we currently playing to win or just playing to participate? What would a true winning aspiration look like for our organization?
What are the implicit where-to-play and how-to-win choices we have made? Are they still the right ones, or are we simply accepting them as unchangeable?
If a new competitor entered our market with our exact strategy, would they succeed? If so, our strategy is not distinctive enough. What can we do to create a truly unique and defensible position?