Here is an excerpt from an article written by Roger L. Martin for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

* * *

The CEO of a large Australian company called me to relay a particular strategy development problem his firm was facing, and ask for my advice. The company was an eager user of my “cascading choices” framework for strategy that I have used for decades and written about extensively, most prominently in the 2013 book I wrote, with friend and colleague A.G. Lafley, called Playing to Win.

My Australian friend explained that each of his five business unit presidents was using the Strategy Choice Cascade, and that all of them had gotten stuck in the same place. They had chosen a Winning Aspiration and had settled on a Where to Play choice. But all of them were stuck at the How to Win box.

It is no surprise, I told my friend, that they have gotten stuck. It is because they considered Where to Play without reference to How to Win.

I’ve heard variants of this over and over. Although I have always emphasized that these five choices have to link together and reinforce each other, hence the arrows flowing back and forth between the boxes, it has become clear to me that I haven’t done a good enough job of making this point, especially as it relates to the choices of Where to Play and How to Win.

The challenge here is that both are linked, and together they are the heart of strategy; without a great Where to Play and How to Win combination, you can’t possibly have a worthwhile strategy. Of course, Where to Play and How to Win have to link with and reinforce an inspiring Winning Aspiration. And Capabilities and Management Systems act as a reality check on the Where to Play and How to Win choice. If you can’t identify a set of Capabilities and Management Systems that you currently have, or can reasonably build, to make the Where to Play and How to Win choices come to fruition, it is a fantasy, not a strategy.

Many people ask me why Capabilities and Management Systems are part of strategy when they are really elements of execution. That is yet another manifestation of the widespread, artificial, and unhelpful attempt to distinguish between choices that are “strategic” and ones that are “executional” or “tactical.” Remember that, regardless of what name you give them, these choices are a critical part of the integrated set of five choices that are necessary to successfully guide the actions of an organization.

I had to tell my Australian friend that locking and loading on Where to Play choices, rather than setting the table for a great discussion of How to Win, actually makes it virtually impossible to have a productive consideration of How to Win. That is because no meaningful Where to Play choice exists outside the context of a particular How to Win plan. An infinite number of Where to Play choices are possible, and equally meritorious — before considering each’s How to Win. In other words, there aren’t inherently strong and weak Where to Play choices. They are only strong or weak in the context of a particular How to Win choice. Therefore, making lists of Where to Play choices before considering How to Win choices has zero value in strategy.

For example, Uber made a Where to Play choice that included China because it’s a huge and important market. But being huge and important didn’t make that choice inherently meritorious. It would have been meritorious only if there had been a clear How to Win as well — which it appears there never was. Microsoft made a Where to Play choice to get into smartphone hardware (with its acquisition of Nokia’s handset business) because it was a huge and growing market, seemingly adjacent to Microsoft’s own, but it had no useful conception of how that would be twinned with a How to Win — and it lost spectacularly. P&G made a Where to Play choice to get into the huge, profitable, and growing pharmaceutical business with the acquisition of Norwich Eaton, in 1982. While it performed decently in the business, it divested the business in 2009 because, in those nearly two decades, it came to realize that it could play but never win in that still-exciting Where to Play.

* * *

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Roger L. Martin is a professor at and the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is a coauthor of Playing to Win (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).