Playing to Win

My own early experiences with strategy were pretty uninspiring – slow, incremental, and almost entirely analytical. But the framework that Roger and AG lay out in Playing to Win changed it all for me. It’s practical. It’s understandable. And it is aimed at not just understanding the world as it is, but at imaging a world that might be different… and forging a real strategy to bring that new world to life. The book is based on the approach to strategy Roger honed in his career as a management disclosure and that AG practiced as CEO at Procter & Gamble.… show more.

This is your strategy playbook: it will teach you to think systematically about the amorphous subject of strategy. It is both concrete and an eye-opener on what strategy is and can do for an organization. Use it as a step-by-step guide to think about strategy, and use it also to understand what strategy is.

This is the story of how P&G does marketing, written by their most successful CEO. Now, of course, P&G is hardly a small business. But they’re one of the most successful marketing businesses of all time, and their rigorous, analytical approach is something that all small businesses can learn from.

It’s based around the simple idea of deciding “where to play” and “how to win”. But that simple idea enabled Lafley to double P&G’s sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. If we can achieve a tiny fraction of… show more.