Book Review: Playing To Win

Key Takeaway: Playing to Win argues that strategy is an integrated cascade of 5 choices: Winning Aspiration, Where to Play, How to Win, Core Capabilities, and Management Systems. The choices must reinforce each other, or you have two strategies arguing instead of one. Written by P&G's former CEO and one of the world's most respected strategy thinkers, it's unique in being academically rigorous and tested in practice on brands like Olay, Tide, and Gillette. Critics note it's P&G-centric, but the framework has held up across a decade of use. The most practical strategy book ever written by people who ran a strategy.

The second book in our executive book review series is Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin. We started with Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy / Bad Strategy because it's the best diagnostic book in the strategy canon. We're following it with this one because, where Rumelt teaches you to spot bad strategy, Lafley and Martin teach you how to actually build good strategy. The two books are complements, not substitutes. Read them in this order if you can.

Originally published in 2013 by Harvard Business Review Press, Playing to Win won the Thinkers50 Best Business Book award for 2012-13. The book was reissued in an expanded edition in September 2025 with a new foreword by former HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius and two additional HBR articles. The longevity of the original framework, more than a decade after first publication, is itself unusual in the strategy genre, where most books fade within 3-5 years.

Who wrote this, and why their credentials matter

The book's authority comes from a rare combination. A.G. Lafley was CEO of Procter & Gamble from 2000 to 2009 (and again, briefly, from 2013 to 2015). During his first tenure, P&G doubled its sales, quadrupled its profits, and added more than $100 billion to its market value. Roger Martin was Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto from 1998 to 2013, and was later named the world's #1 management thinker by Thinkers50 in 2017. The two collaborated closely during Lafley's CEO years, with Martin advising on the strategic framework that drove P&G's transformation.

This pairing makes the book distinct from most strategy books, which are written either by academics with no operational experience or by ex-CEOs without theoretical depth. Lafley brings the operational lens. Martin brings the framework. The book is the product of a real strategic transformation at one of the world's largest companies, written down in real time, by the two people most responsible for it.

That matters because strategy books are easy to write and hard to test. Most of the canon is essays on what strategy should be. Playing to Win is one of the few that documents what worked, at scale, with named brands and measurable outcomes.

The central argument: strategy is 5 integrated choices

The book's organizing idea is deceptively simple. Strategy is an integrated cascade of 5 choices. Each choice depends on the one above it. Each choice constrains the choices below it. The cascade has to cohere, or you don't have a strategy. You have a set of decisions that secretly contradict each other.

The 5 choices, in canonical order:

1. What is our winning aspiration?
2. Where will we play?
3. How will we win?
4. What capabilities must we have in place to win?
5. What management systems are required to support our choices?

Lafley and Martin are emphatic that these are not 5 separate questions to be answered independently. They are linked. The Winning Aspiration constrains Where to Play. Where to Play constrains How to Win. How to Win dictates which Capabilities matter. Capabilities determine which Management Systems are required. A cascade where the choices don't fit each other isn't a strategy. It's two strategies arguing.

This integration is the book's signature contribution. Other strategy frameworks (Porter's Five Forces, Blue Ocean Strategy, BCG's growth-share matrix) focus on isolated dimensions of competitive analysis. Lafley and Martin's cascade insists that strategy is the combination. The book devotes most of its pages to explaining how the 5 choices reinforce each other in practice, and what goes wrong when they don't.

Let me walk through each choice, because this is the framework most executives will end up using.

Choice 1: Winning Aspiration

The first choice is the purpose of the enterprise. What does winning actually look like for us, and who specifically are we beating to get there?

Lafley and Martin draw a hard line between "winning" and "playing." Most companies have aspirations that sound impressive but commit to nothing. "Be the leader in customer satisfaction." "Become a respected innovator in our category." "Build a great company." These are not winning aspirations. They are participation aspirations dressed up.

A real winning aspiration is specific enough that you'd know whether you achieved it. P&G's winning aspiration during the Lafley era was to be "the best at improving the lives of more of the world's consumers, more completely." That sounds soft, but the framework forced specificity. Each P&G brand had its own winning aspiration translated into concrete numbers: market position, household penetration, brand strength, financial performance. The aspiration was at the corporate level, but it was operationalized at the brand level into measurable commitments.

The contrast Lafley and Martin draw is between playing to win and playing to participate. Playing to participate means trying to stay in the game without committing to what it takes to dominate. Spreading resources thin. Avoiding hard choices. Hedging across markets. Playing to win means picking specific markets, specific customers, and specific ways to beat the people already competing for them. Most companies, the book argues, are playing to participate without admitting it. The first job of strategy is to choose, explicitly, to play to win.

Choice 2: Where to Play

The second choice is the most operationally consequential, and the one where most strategies fall apart. Where will we play? Which markets, segments, geographies, channels, product categories? And critically: which ones will we explicitly not play in?

The book is unsparing on this point. Strategy is choice, and choice means saying no. A company that wants to play everywhere is a company that has refused to choose. Lafley and Martin write that "if your strategy doesn't rule anything out, it isn't a strategy." The Where-to-Play question is the moment that test gets applied. A real strategy declares specific markets, customers, and channels in scope and explicitly declares others out of scope.

The Olay case study in the book is the cleanest illustration. By the late 1990s, Oil of Olay was a $800 million brand selling pink cream in a simple plastic bottle for $3.99, mainly through drugstores. P&G's strategic choice was to redefine Where to Play. They could have competed in the bargain-basement segment of skincare (where Olay already played) or in the prestige segment ($30+ at department stores). Both had real competitors and required different strategies. The Olay team chose neither. They created a new "masstige" segment, selling premium-quality products at $18.99 through mass retail. That Where-to-Play choice changed everything downstream. Within a decade, Olay had become a multi-billion-dollar brand and the leader in mass skincare.

The Olay case works because the Where-to-Play choice was specific and exclusive. P&G explicitly chose not to compete in prestige skincare, not to keep the $3.99 product as the brand's center, not to chase department-store distribution. The exclusion was as important as the inclusion.

Choice 3: How to Win

If Where to Play is the playing field, How to Win is the way you compete on it. What advantage will you build that rivals can't easily copy? What value proposition is so distinctive that customers in your chosen market choose you over the alternatives?

Lafley and Martin draw heavily on Michael Porter here. The two ways to win, in their framing, are cost leadership (be cheaper than competitors at delivering the same value) or differentiation (deliver value rivals can't match). Trying to do both, they argue, is the surest path to losing. You can't be the cheapest and the most distinctive at the same time. The companies that try usually end up neither. This is also the same trap we cover in our piece on why partial strategy execution fails: companies that hedge on the fundamental choice end up executing neither version of it well.

For Olay, the How-to-Win was a combination of premium-quality formulations (the differentiation), packaging and shelving designed for the mass channel (operational efficiency), and a brand transformation from "your mom's skincare" to "skincare you'd choose at any age." Each element reinforced the others. The formulations supported the premium price. The mass channel supported volume. The brand transformation gave customers permission to pay the premium. Take any one element out and the strategy stops working.

The book is full of similar examples from P&G brands: Tide's How-to-Win was clean clothes through superior chemistry. Gillette's was a closer shave through engineering investment that smaller competitors couldn't match. Bounty's was strength and absorbency that justified a premium price. Each How-to-Win is specific to its Where-to-Play. None of them could be lifted out and applied to a different market.

Choice 4: Core Capabilities

What does the organization need to be brilliant at to deliver the How-to-Win? Capabilities are the answer.

Lafley and Martin are specific that capabilities aren't a long list. A real strategy identifies a handful of activities the organization must do better than anyone else. For P&G during the Lafley years, the core capabilities were consumer understanding (knowing the customer better than competitors did), brand-building (creating long-lived brand value), innovation (a disciplined R&D process that turned insight into product), go-to-market excellence (sales and distribution muscle at retail), and scale (the cost advantages of being one of the largest CPG companies in the world).

Notice how those capabilities tie back to the choices above them. Consumer understanding supported Where-to-Play decisions by identifying which segments had room to win. Brand-building supported How-to-Win by giving each brand a defensible premium. Innovation kept the differentiation refreshed. The capabilities aren't generic competitive advantages. They're the specific muscles required for P&G's specific cascade to work.

The trap most companies fall into is listing capabilities that are nice to have but don't connect to the strategy. A list of 15 capabilities is a list. A list of 5 that map to the How-to-Win is a strategy.

Choice 5: Management Systems

The fifth choice is the one most executives skip, and the reason most strategies never get executed. What structures, measures, and processes will keep the strategy alive in the day-to-day operations of the company?

This is the OKR practitioner's choice, in a sense. Strategy that lives in a deck is dead. Strategy that lives in the management cadence (the goals, the reviews, the resource allocation, the performance management) is alive. Lafley and Martin describe how P&G's management systems were redesigned to support the strategy. Compensation was tied to brand-level performance. Resource allocation followed strategic priority. Reviews focused on the choices, not the activities. The systems weren't generic management infrastructure; they were custom-built to keep the cascade coherent over time.

This is also where the cascade pays off operationally. A company with a real strategy can answer, in any management meeting, whether a specific initiative supports the cascade or contradicts it. A company without a real strategy can't. The management systems are how that test gets applied.

This is exactly the territory we cover in our Ultimate Guide to Strategy Execution. Lafley and Martin make the strategic argument; the execution layer is where it actually pays off.

The reverse-engineering exercise

The single most valuable exercise in the book, in my opinion, is what Lafley and Martin call reverse-engineering the strategy. Rather than starting with the 5 choices and working forward, you start with a proposed strategy and ask: what would have to be true for this strategy to win?

The discipline is to surface every assumption embedded in the strategy and test it. What would have to be true about the market? About customers? About competitors? About your own capabilities? About the future? If any of those required truths is fragile or unsupported, the strategy is fragile. The reverse-engineering exercise is a brutal but effective way to pressure-test a cascade before committing to it.

I've watched leadership teams use this exercise on strategies they thought were strong, and discover within an hour that their winning depends on 3 or 4 things being true that haven't been examined. Sometimes the assumptions are defensible. Sometimes they aren't. Either way, the team comes out of the exercise with a much sharper sense of where the strategy is solid and where it's standing on assumptions that need stress-testing.

What the critics say

Playing to Win is widely respected, but it's not without fair criticism.

The most common critique is that the book is heavily P&G-centric. Almost every extended case study comes from P&G's brand portfolio. Critics argue that the framework looks more universal than it is, because it was developed inside a single company with specific characteristics: enormous scale, branded consumer products, deep R&D budgets, and decades of consumer research infrastructure. The 5-choice cascade is undoubtedly real, but applying it inside a software startup or a B2B services firm requires more adaptation than the book acknowledges. Lafley and Martin have addressed this in subsequent writing, but the original book leans hard on P&G.

A second critique is that the framework underweights timing and adaptation. The cascade is presented as if strategy is a one-time set of choices, refreshed periodically. In practice, the choices need to evolve continuously as markets shift, competitors move, and technologies disrupt categories. The book is less helpful on how the cascade should be revisited and updated in flight than on how to set it the first time. The 2025 expanded edition's added HBR articles partially address this, but the original framework presents strategy as more static than the real world is.

A third critique, which I'd add: the book is stronger on choices than on disagreements. Most leadership teams don't fail at strategy because they don't know the 5 questions. They fail because they can't agree on the answers, and the book is light on how to navigate that disagreement. Rumelt's Good Strategy / Bad Strategy is much sharper on this dynamic, which is part of why I recommend reading the two books together.

None of these criticisms invalidate the book. They sharpen its use. Playing to Win is the strongest framework available for setting strategy at a given point in time, especially for companies that have the resources to make explicit, large choices. Pair it with Rumelt for diagnosis, with newer literature for adaptation, and you have a complete strategy toolkit.

Why this is a must-read for executives

Five reasons.

It gives you a vocabulary your leadership team can actually share. Most strategy conversations fail because the people in the room are using the same words for different things. "Strategy" means one thing to the CEO, another to the CFO, another to the marketing leader. The 5-choice cascade forces everyone onto the same terms. After a few weeks of using the framework, "Where to Play" stops being a vague phrase and becomes a specific kind of choice every executive recognizes.

It makes you choose. The Where-to-Play question, in particular, is uncomfortable. Choosing where to play means choosing where not to play, and most leadership teams resist that. The book gives you the discipline and the language to force the exclusion. "If we're playing here, what are we explicitly choosing not to play in?" That single question, asked seriously, surfaces more strategic ambiguity than any other intervention I've seen. The same dynamic plays out at the goal-setting layer, which is why we keep arguing in 10 OKR dogmas you should ignore that good goal-setting is a series of explicit, exclusive choices.

It connects strategy to execution. The 5th choice (Management Systems) is the bridge from the strategy deck to the company calendar. Most strategy books stop at choice 4. By making management systems an explicit part of the strategy itself, Playing to Win refuses to let strategy live separately from how the company actually runs. This is exactly the connective tissue our Ultimate Guide to OKR tries to make tangible at the goal-setting layer.

It has been tested at scale. Unlike most strategy books, this one has documented track record. The choices described in the book were made at P&G during a real strategic transformation, and the outcomes (doubled sales, quadrupled profits, +$100B in market value) are matters of public record. That doesn't mean the framework will produce the same results everywhere. It does mean it's been tested somewhere, by the people writing about it, with verifiable outcomes. That's rare in this genre.

The writing is precise. The book is around 270 pages, structured around the 5 questions, with a long case study tied to each. There's almost no filler. Lafley and Martin write like the executives they are: clearly, with no jargon, with every concept supported by an example. This is one of the more readable books in the strategy canon, which matters because strategy books that don't get finished don't get applied.

The verdict

Playing to Win is the most practical strategy book ever written by people who actually ran a strategy. It's not perfect. It's P&G-centric. It's static where reality is dynamic. It assumes a level of resourcing that most companies don't have. But the core framework is so durable that it has outlasted a decade of strategy fashions, and the expanded 2025 edition suggests it will outlast another decade. If you can only read 2 strategy books in your career, this and Good Strategy / Bad Strategy are the two.

The exercise to do this week, if you take only one thing from this review: pick one of your current strategic initiatives and reverse-engineer it. Write down what would have to be true for this initiative to win. List the customer assumptions, the competitive assumptions, the capability assumptions, the timing assumptions, the resource assumptions. Then ask, for each one, whether you're confident enough to bet the company on it. If you're not, you don't yet have a strategy. You have a hypothesis. That's not a failure of the exercise. That's the exercise doing its job.

[fs-toc-omit]How Perdoo helps you operationalize the cascade

Lafley and Martin's 5th choice (Management Systems) is where strategy meets day-to-day operations, and it's where most cascades quietly die. The choices stay clear on the strategy deck and slowly disconnect from how the company actually allocates resources, sets goals, and reviews progress. Perdoo is built to keep that connection alive. Strategic Pillars live at the top of your Strategy Map, OKRs translate the Where-to-Play and How-to-Win choices into time-bound changes you're driving, KPIs measure whether the strategy is actually producing the outcomes the cascade predicts, and Initiatives connect the work each team is doing to the strategy above it. Each element ties to a parent, and the whole tree is visible to the entire company by default. If you've done the strategic work and now need the management system to keep it alive, start for free or request a demo.