In the video below, Roger Martin discusses the book he authored with former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley called Playing to Win. The book touches on the strategies that Martin and Lafley employed to help Procter & Gamble quadruple its profits and increase its market capitalization by $100 billion in just 10 years, and how these strategies translate to every organization. A full version of the interview can be found here.
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Brendan Byrnes: Can you talk about why you called the book Playing to Win, and how does one play to win?
Roger Martin: Sure. We called it Playing to Win because what A.G. and I believe strongly is that if a company doesn't attempt to win -- by which we mean have a better value proposition for the customer than anybody they're competing with -- then one of those other companies will choose to do that and they will eventually eat your lunch.
Serving the customer better, having a better value proposition, is the aspiration that you need to have. If you do that, if you set that as your aspiration, then it will help you make choices that are consistent with that.
If you've got this general, fuzzy, "We want to sell stuff" kind of aspiration, then it won't help you make the choices that say, "What do we have to do to actually make that happen?"
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To watch the full interview with Roger Martin, click here.
