Playing to Win:How Strategy Really Works, Expanded Edition
A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin
Harvard Business Review Press (September 2025)

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” Michael Porter

This is an expanded edition of what has become a business classic, first published in 2015. This new addition has an Introduction by Adi Ignatius, there are  two superb HBR articles: “Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy”  co- written with Jan W. Rivkin and Nicolai Siggelkow in the September edition in 2012 and “Leaders Shouldn’t Try to Do It All,” published in the January-February edition that are directly relevant to A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin’s material in Playing to Win . Its first edition is so well written that only a  few minor updates were made. The insights continue to be  timely because they are timeless.

Here is my review of the First Edition of Playing to Win.

* * *

I am pleased that A.G. Lafley has co-authored another book, with Roger Martin, after previously working on the The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, with Ram Charan. Whereas in that first book they focus is on how to drive revenue and profit growth with innovation, their focus in Playing to Win is on how strategy really works. Most of the time it doesn’t and reasons vary. Lafley and Martin identify these familiar troublemakers:

1. Defining strategy as a vision
2. Defining strategy as a plan
3. Denying that the long-term (or even the medium-term) strategy is possible
4. Defining strategy as the optimization of the status quo
5. Defining strategy as following best practices

Rather, Lafley and Martin suggest that a strategy “is a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems.” In this context, I am reminded of two recently published books. In Judgment Calls, Tom Davenport and Brooke Manville offer “an antidote for the Great Man theory of decision making and organizational performance”: organizational judgment. That is, “the collective capacity to make good calls and wise moves when the need for them exceeds the scope of any single leader’s direct control.” In Martin’s brilliant book, The Opposable Mind, he calls this “integrative thinking.” Winning the game (whatever its nature and extent) would thus require a strategy that is both inclusive and collaborative.

In Paul Schoemaker’s business “classic,”, Brilliant Mistakes, he observes: “The key question companies need to address is not `Should we make mistakes?’ but rather `Which mistakes should we make in order to test our deeply held assumptions?'” The mistakes to which Schoemaker refers are deliberate. Their purpose is to help achieve strategic objectives. Those who play to win cannot be risk-averse. That is, play not to lose. If strategy is a set of choices “that uniquely positions the given enterprise so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition,” and I believe it is, then quality of judgment is imperative, not only when making a specific choice but throughout a continuous and cohesive decision-making process.

These are among the dozens of passages in Playing to Win that I found to be of greatest interest and value, also listed to suggest the range of subjects covered during the course of the book’s narrative:

o How to Win (Pages 24-29)
o Playing to Win (39-43)
o The Importance of the Right Playing Field, and, Three Dangerous Temptations (57-65)
o Differentiation Strategies (83-88)

o Gillette and the Strategic Choice Cascade (107-112)
o Understanding Capabilities and Activity Systems (112-119)
o Systems for Making and Renewing Strategy (129-136)
o Systems to Support Core Capabilities (144-149)

o Customer Value Analysis (167-171)
o Generating Buy-In: The Traditional Approach (183-200)
o The Dangerous Temptations: Six Strategy Traps (214-215)
o Six Telltale Signs of a Winning Strategy (215-216)

When concluding their book, A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin acknowledge, “All strategy entails risk. But operating in a slow-growing, fast-changing, intensely competitive world without a strategy to guide you is far riskier. Leaders lead, and a good place to start leading is in strategy development for your business. Use the strategic choice cascade [Pages 17-18 and 33-34], the strategy logic flow [161-177] and reverse engineering of strategic choices [186-200] to craft a winning strategy and sustainable competitive advantage for your organization. Play to win.”

No brief commentary such as mine can possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of material that A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin provide in Playing to Win but I hope that I have at least suggested why I think so highly of their book. Also, I hope that those who read this commentary will be better prepared to determine whether or not they wish to read it and, in that event, will have at least some idea of how an enriched and enlightened understanding of what strategy is — and isn’t — could  be of substantial benefit to their professional development as well as to the success of their organization.