Playing to win: How strategy really works

by A.G. Lafley

there is no single, clear, and pervasive definition of strategy and even less consensus on how to build one. When a strategy succeeds, it seems a little like magic, unknowable and unexplainable in advance but obvious in retrospect. It isn’t. Really, strategy is about making specific choices to win in the marketplace. According to Mike Porter, author of Competitive Strategy, perhaps the most widely respected book on strategy ever written, a firm creates a sustainable competitive advantage over its rivals by “deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver unique value.”1 Strategy therefore requires making explicit choices—to do some things and not others—and building a business around those choices.2 In short, strategy is choice. More specifically, strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.