Playing to Win. Roger L. Martin
Читать онлайн книгу.
or expand online? Within retail, should there be one store model or several to adapt to different geographies and customer segments? At the store level, how should the staff person serve the customer, here and now, in order to win? Each level in the organization has its own strategic choice cascade.
Consider the salesperson in the Manhattan store. She defines winning as being the best salesperson in the store and having customers who are delighted with her service. From not only her daily sales numbers but also her interactions with repeat customers and feedback from her peers, she knows she’s succeeding. Her where-to-play choice is largely defined by the folks who walk in the door, but she may notice that there are types of customers, times of day, or parts of the store where she can best bring her skills to bear. She consequently turns her attention there. In terms of how to win, she may have one approach for customers who are new to yoga and intimidated by all the choices (offering advice not just on attire but on how to get started, as well as reassurance that it will all make sense in time), another for aficionados (highlighting the technical specs of the gear but also swapping stories about classes and instructors), and another for the fashion crowd who seek yoga pants not for athletics but for running errands (pointing out racks of new arrivals, emphasizing unique colors and designs). She chooses to develop her own capabilities in clear communication, understanding technical specs, and practicing different forms of yoga. She builds her own management systems, like a personal cheat sheet for products and styles and a directory of her favorite local studios and instructors.
These frontline choices may not seem as complex as the choices facing the CEO, but they are indeed strategic choices. Like the CEO, a salesperson must make the best choices she can under constraints and uncertainty. Her constraints came from the choices made above her in the organization, from the demands of her customers, and from the strategies of her competitors. For the CEO, the constraints came from the expectations of the capital markets, the company’s cash reserves, and the directions of the board of directors. Both the salesperson and her CEO are making strategic choices and acting upon them—the only difference is the scope of the choices and the precise nature of the constraints.
Strategy can be created and refined at every level of the organization using the choice cascade framework. Each box of the choice cascade is the subject of an upcoming chapter, but for now, we’ll explain a little about each one, using Olay brand-level and P&G company-level choices as illustrations.
Winning Aspirations
The first question—what is our winning aspiration?—sets the frame for all the other choices. A company must seek to win in a particular place and in a particular way. If it doesn’t seek to win, it is wasting the time of its people and the investments of its capital providers. But to be most helpful, the abstract concept of winning should be translated into defined aspirations. Aspirations are statements about the ideal future. At a later stage in the process, a company ties to those aspirations some specific benchmarks that measure progress toward them.
At Olay, the winning aspirations were defined as market share leadership in North America, $1 billion in sales, and a global share that put the brand among the market leaders. A revitalized and transformed Olay was expected to establish skin care as a strong pillar for beauty along with hair care. Establishing and maintaining leadership of a new masstige segment, positioned between mass and prestige, was a third aspiration. This set of aspirations served as a starting point to define where to play and how to win, enabling the Olay team to see the larger purpose in what it was doing. Clarity about the winning aspirations meant that actions at the brand, category, sector, and company level were directed at delivering against that ideal.
At the overall company level, winning was defined as delivering the most valuable, value-creating brands in every category and industry in which P&G chose to compete (in other words, market leadership in all of P&G’s categories). The aspiration was to create sustainable competitive advantage, superior value, and superior financial returns. P&G’s statement of purpose, at the time, read as follows: “We will provide products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s consumers. As a result, consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders, and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.” Improving consumers’ lives to drive leadership sales, profit, and value creation was the company’s most important aspiration. It drove all subsequent choices.
Aspirations can be refined and revised over time. However, aspirations shouldn’t change day to day; they exist to consistently align activities within the firm, so should be designed to last for some time. A definition of winning provides a context for the rest of the strategic choices; in all cases, choices should fit within and support the firm’s aspirations. The question of what a winning aspiration is will be further explored in chapter 2.
Where to Play
The next two questions are where to play and how to win. These two choices, which are tightly bound up with one another, form the very heart of strategy and are the two most critical questions in strategy formulation. The winning aspiration broadly defines the scope of the firm’s activities; where to play and how to win define the specific activities of the organization—what the firm will do, and where and how it will do this, to achieve its aspirations.
Where to play represents the set of choices that narrow the competitive field. The questions to be asked focus on where the company will compete—in which markets, with which customers and consumers, in which channels, in which product categories, and at which vertical stage or stages of the industry in question. This set of questions is vital; no company can be all things to all people and still win, so it is important to understand which where-to-play choices will best enable the company to win. A firm can be narrow or broad. It can compete in any number of demographic segments (men ages eighteen to twenty-four, midlife urbanites, working moms) and geographies (local, national, international, developed world, economically fast-advancing countries like Brazil and China). It can compete in myriad services, product lines, and categories. It can participate in different channels (direct to consumer, online, mass merchandise, grocery, department store). It can participate in the upstream part of its industry, downstream, or be vertically integrated. These choices, when taken together, capture the strategic playing field for the firm.
Olay made two strategically decisive where-to-play choices: to create, with retail partners, a new masstige segment in mass discount stores, drugstores, and grocery stores to compete with prestige brands and to develop a new and growing point-of-entry consumer segment for anti-aging skin-care products. Many other where-to-play options were considered (like moving into prestige channels and selling through department and specialty stores), but to win, Olay’s choices on where to play needed to make sense in light of P&G’s company-level where-to-play choices and capabilities. P&G tends to do well when the consumer is highly involved with the product category and cares a good deal about product experience and performance. It excels with brands that promise real improvement when the consumer puts in effort on a regular basis, as part of a well-defined regimen. P&G also does well with brands that can be sold through its best customers, retailers with which it has strong relationships and with which it can create significant shared value. So, the Olay team decided where to play with the P&G choices and capabilities in mind.
Corporately, when it came to where to play, the company needed to define which regions, categories, channels, and consumers would give P&G a sustainable competitive advantage. The idea was to play in those areas where P&G’s capabilities would be decisive and to avoid areas where they were not. The concept that helped P&G leaders sort one area from the other and to define the strategic playing field clearly was the idea of core.
We wanted to play where P&G’s core strengths would enable it to win. We asked which brands truly were core brands, identifying a set of brands that were clear industry or category leaders and devoting resources to them disproportionately. We asked what P&G’s core geographies were. With ten countries representing 85 percent of profits, P&G had to focus on winning in those countries. We asked where consumers expected P&G brands and products to be sold, that is, mass merchandisers and discounters, drugstores, and grocery stores. Core became a theme in innovation as well. P&G scientists determined the core technologies that were important across