5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy

Roger Martin, professor emeritus at the Rotman School of Management and a leading strategy advisor and author of Playing to Win, explains why strategy is hard and how to build one. The conversation walks through his five-question strategy choice cascade, the two routes to winning (low cost or differentiation), how to spot playing-to-play, and how to make small, practical improvements to close gaps.

01Key learnings

• Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action, since customers are the one thing a company cannot directly control.
• Work through the five cascade questions together: winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, required capabilities, and enabling management systems.
• Winning requires being either differentiated or lowest cost; without one of those, competitors can keep pushing you back step by step.
• Check whether customers would pick you over alternatives without a coin flip; if not, you may be playing to play rather than to win.
• Frame winning aspirations around how customers benefit, not around capturing a big market, since market-size rationales often fail.
• Build capabilities and management systems that are hard for competitors to copy, so they choose a different playing field instead of attacking yours.
• Anyone can practice strategy; great strategists are simply those with more reps, so don't defer strategic thinking until operational concerns clear.
• Practice betterment over perfection: pick the most painful gap between current and desired outcomes and make different choices to close it, then move to the next gap.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.