Playing to Win. Roger L. Martin
Читать онлайн книгу.
service rather than software sales) around these two choices. The result was a billion-dollar company with a thriving enterprise business.
The myriad ways to win, and possibilities for thinking through them, will be explored in greater depth in chapter 4. There, we begin with the story of a set of technologies that posed a particularly challenging how-to-win choice for P&G.
Core Capabilities
Two questions flow from and support the heart of strategy: (1) what capabilities must be in place to win, and (2) what management systems are required to support the strategic choices? The first of these questions, the capabilities choice, relates to the range and quality of activities that will enable a company to win where it chooses to play. Capabilities are the map of activities and competencies that critically underpin specific where-to-play and how-to-win choices.
The Olay team had to invest in building and creating its capabilities on a number of fronts: clearly, innovation would be vital—and not just product innovation—but packaging, distribution, marketing, and even business model innovation would play a role. The team would need to leverage its existing consumer insights to truly understand a different segment. It would have to build the brand, advertise, and merchandise with mass retailers in new ways. Olay and P&G skin care couldn’t go it alone. So, they partnered with product ingredient innovators (Cellderma), designers (IDEO and others), advertising and PR agencies (Saatchi & Saatchi), and key influencers (like beauty magazine editors and dermatologists, for credible product performance endorsements). This networked alliance of internal and external capabilities created a unique and powerful activity system. It required deepening existing capabilities and building new ones.
At P&G, a company with more than 125,000 employees worldwide, the range of capabilities is broad and diverse. But only a few capabilities are absolutely fundamental to winning in the places and manner that it has chosen:
Deep consumer understanding. This is the ability to truly know shoppers and end users. The goal is to uncover the unarticulated needs of consumers, to know consumers better than any competitors do, and to see opportunities before they are obvious to others.
Innovation. Innovation is P&G’s lifeblood. P&G seeks to translate deep understanding of consumer needs into new and continuously improved products. Innovation efforts may be applied to the product, to the packaging, to the way P&G serves its consumers and works with its trade customers, or even to its business models, core capabilities, and management systems.
Brand building. Branding has long been one of P&G’s strongest capabilities. By better defining and distilling a brand-building heuristic, P&G can train and develop brand leaders and marketers in this discipline effectively and efficiently.
Go-to-market ability. wrelationships. P&G thrives on reaching its customers and consumers at the right time, in the right place, in the right way. By investing in unique partnerships with retailers, P&G can create new and breakthrough go-to-market strategies that allow it to deliver more value to consumers in the store and to retailers throughout the supply chain.
Global scale. P&G is a global, multicategory company. Rather than operate in distinct silos, its categories can increase the power of the whole by hiring together, learning together, buying together, researching and testing together, and going to market together. In the 1990s, P&G amalgamated a whole suite of internal support services, like employee services and IT, under one umbrella—global business services (GBS)—to allow it to capture the scale benefits of those functions globally.
These five core capabilities support and reinforce one another and, taken together, set P&G apart. In isolation, each capability is strong, but insufficient to generate true competitive advantage over the long term. Rather, the way all of them work together and reinforce each other is what generates enduring advantage. A great new idea coming out of P&G labs can be effectively branded and shelved around the world in the best retail outlets in each market. That combination is hard for competitors to match. Core capabilities, and the way in which they relate to competitive advantage, will be discussed further in chapter 5.
Management Systems
The final strategic choice in the cascade focuses on management systems. These are the systems that foster, support, and measure the strategy. To be truly effective, they must be purposefully designed to support the choices and capabilities. The types of systems and measures will vary from choice to choice, capability to capability, and company to company. In general, though, the systems need to ensure that choices are communicated to the whole company, employees are trained to deliver on choices and leverage capabilities, plans are made to invest in and sustain capabilities over time, and the efficacy of the choices and progress toward aspirations are measured.
Beneath Olay’s choices and capabilities, the team built supporting systems and measures that included a “love the job you’re in” human resources strategy (to encourage personal development and deepen the talent pool in the beauty sector) and detailed tracking systems to measure consumer responses to brand, package, product lines, and every other element of the marketing mix. Olay organized around innovation, creating a structure wherein one team was working on the strategy and rollout of current products while another was designing the next generation. It developed technical marketers, individuals with expertise in R&D as well as marketing, who could speak credibly to dermatologists and beauty editors. It created systems to partner with leading in-store marketing and design firms, to create Olay displays that were eye-catching and inviting to shop. It also leveraged P&G systems like global purchasing, the global market development organization (MDO), and GBS so that individuals on the skin-care and Olay teams were freed up to focus where they added the most value.
At the corporate level, management systems included strategy dialogues, innovation-program reviews, brand-equity reviews, budget and operating plan discussions, and talent assessment development reviews. From the year 2000 on, every one of these management systems was changed significantly so that it became more effective. All of these systems were tightly integrated, mutually reinforcing, and crucial to winning. Management systems in general, and the way they work specifically at P&G, will be explored in greater depth in chapter 6.
The Power of Choices
We began this discussion with the Olay story. In our view, Olay succeeded because it had an integrated set of five strategic choices (figure 1-3) that fit beautifully with the choices of the corporate parent (figure 1-4). Because the choices were well integrated and reinforced category-, sector-, and company-level choices, succeeding at the Olay brand level actually helped deliver on the strategies above it.
FIGURE 1-3
Olay’s choices
Olay leveraged P&G’s core capabilities in ways that made sense for the brand. The Olay team used deep consumer understanding to determine just where and how it could position Olay as an anti-aging powerhouse. It leveraged scale and R&D leadership to create a better product at a competitive price. It used P&G’s brand-building expertise and channel relationships to convince consumers to try the product on the store shelves. All of this was crucial to reinventing the brand, to transforming its position in the marketplace, and to truly winning.
FIGURE 1-4
P&G’s choices
Summing Up
It isn’t entirely easy to make your way through the full choice cascade. Doing so isn’t a one-way, linear process. There is no checklist, whereby you create and articulate aspirations, then move on to where-to-play and how-to-win choices, then consider capabilities. Rather, strategy is an iterative process in which all of the moving parts influence one another and must be taken into account together. A company must understand its existing core capabilities