Playing to Win by Lafley & Martin: Strategy Book Review
This paper reviews Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, co-authored by former Procter & Gamble CEO A. G. Lafley and Rotman School of Management Dean Roger Martin. The review summarizes the book's central argument that effective strategy requires making clear, integrated choices rather than relying on vision statements or best-practice imitation. Using P&G's turnaround and the Olay brand as a case study, the paper explains the authors' five-step strategy cascade — from winning aspiration to management systems — and evaluates the book's practical value for leaders at all organizational levels. The review concludes with a positive overall assessment, noting the book's accessibility and applicability across both for-profit and non-profit contexts.
- Overview of Playing to Win: Authors, credentials, and book's core purpose
- Core Argument: Strategy as Choice: Five common strategy mistakes leaders make
- The Five-Step Strategy Cascade: Winning aspiration, where to play, how to win
- Supporting Tools and Brand Applications: Reverse engineering, P&G brand trust analysis
- Overall Evaluation: Book rating, audience, and practical takeaways
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What makes this paper effective
- Clearly organizes the book's framework into digestible sections, walking the reader through the five-step strategy cascade with concrete examples from the Olay brand.
- Balances summary with application by contextualizing P&G's strategy choices within broader management concepts such as consumer capitalism and Porter's competitive strategies.
- Provides an honest, reasoned evaluation with a specific rating and justification, demonstrating critical engagement rather than mere description.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of source integration, consistently attributing claims to Lafley and Martin (2013), Denning (2013), and other sources while weaving them into a coherent analytical narrative. This avoids over-reliance on any single source and models proper APA citation practice throughout.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an introduction identifying the authors and their credentials, then moves into an "Application" section that unpacks the book's strategic framework using the Olay case study. It then shifts to an "Evaluation" section offering a critical assessment of the book's usefulness and audience. The structure mirrors a standard book review format: contextualize, analyze, evaluate.
Overview of Playing to Win
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works is co-authored by A. G. Lafley and Roger Martin, two figures with vast knowledge and expertise in management. A. G. Lafley is the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, while Roger Martin served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The book employs Procter & Gamble as a full and comprehensive case study on strategy, clearly outlining the strategic method that Lafley — in close collaboration with Martin, who acted as his strategic adviser — employed to double P&G's sales, increase the company's profits fourfold, and grow its market value by over $100 billion. This was achieved during Lafley's first tenure as CEO, when he led P&G between 2000 and 2009.
Playing to Win shows leaders in any type of organization the approach by which they can align day-to-day activities with greater strategic objectives, built around the clear, vital components that determine business success — namely, where an organization ought to play and how it should win.
Core Argument: Strategy as Choice
Playing to Win is strongly tied to the notion of consumer capitalism. The key principle of the book is that economic profit will flow to stockholders only if a corporation identifies a clear group of consumers to serve and discovers a way to generate unique value for them. Lafley and Martin argue that value does not simply accrue to stockholders through some intangible aspiration to maximize shareholder value. Procter & Gamble is offered as a fitting illustration of consumer capitalism: the company's entire organizational culture is built on the idea that delighting customers — making their lives slightly better each day — is the top priority of the corporation. All positive outcomes flow from satisfying and addressing consumers (Denning, 2013).
Lafley and Martin (2013) assert that strategy is a still-developing discipline centered on making particular choices in one's business. According to the two authors, leaders commit five types of mistakes when designing their strategies. The first is that leaders define strategy only as a vision. Mission and vision statements are elements of strategy, but they are not sufficient on their own — they offer no guide to dynamic action and no clear road map to the desired future. The second mistake is defining strategy merely as a plan. Third, some leaders reject the possibility of long-term or even medium-term strategy on the grounds that the world is changing too rapidly. The fourth mistake is defining strategy as the optimization of what is currently being done within an existing business. Finally, leaders define strategy as following best practices — for instance, benchmarking against competitors and then executing the same set of activities (Lafley and Martin, 2013).
According to Lafley and Martin (2013), any manager in any organization, equipped with a clear definition of strategy as choice, the strategy choice cascade, and the strategic choice structuring process, can build strong strategies. The authors assert that the process rests on a set of five integrated choices, which can be understood as a reinforcing cascade: choices at the top of the cascade set the context for those below, while choices at the bottom influence and filter the choices above. The authors illustrate the value of strategic thinking through their experience at Procter & Gamble, including how they revitalized Oil of Olay, a high-profile product that was languishing in a competitive and growing marketplace (DeBois, 2013).
The Five-Step Strategy Cascade
Lafley and Martin recommend a playbook of five steps for building a strategy. The first step is deciding on a winning aspiration — a choice that speaks to the fundamental purpose of the enterprise. For Oil of Olay, the winning aspiration was to become a leading skin care brand once again. Once a company establishes a clear and challenging aspiration, the paired decisions of where to play and how to win follow.
The second step is choosing where to play, which defines the market for the product or service. This choice identifies precisely where the company or product will compete. In the case of Olay, the brand remained with mass-market retailers such as Walmart and Target rather than moving to high-end stores like Macy's. However, it repositioned itself as a "masstige" product — higher-end than a conventional mass-market beauty product — appealing to an aspirational consumer base (Soundview, 2013).
The third step is deciding how to win, which involves executing strategy through a clear value proposition and a path to competitive advantage. Drawing extensively on Michael Porter's work, Lafley and Martin argue that there are only two winning strategies: differentiation and cost leadership. Cost leadership — being the lowest-cost producer and distributor — can invite new competition as technology enables more efficient production. Differentiation requires deciding what value will be delivered to which consumer segments and how the organization will deliver value beyond what competitors offer. Among Olay's winning strategies was the creation of a superior anti-aging skin care product, sold at the right retail locations to appeal to an aspirational consumer base.
The fourth step is developing core capabilities. The main task here is to define the activities and competencies that support the choices of where to play and how to win. For instance, Olay was able to leverage P&G's strengths in consumer understanding and brand building. The fifth and final step is creating a management system. Strategists must define the structures, systems, and measures needed to support their choices. In this case, Olay was able to leverage P&G's existing systems as well as its network and partner systems. As Lafley and Martin (2013) note, this framework can be applied at all levels of a corporation — the organizational level, a strategic business group, or a single business unit — and the choices at each level must support one another.
References
DeBois, P. (2013). "Playing to Win" explains the 5 strategy mistakes businesses make. Small Business Trends.
Denning, S. (2013). Playing to Win: How strategy really works. Forbes.
Lafley, A. G., & Martin, R. L. (2013). Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Harvard Business Review Press.
Soundview. (2013). Learn to win from an all-time great CEO.
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