Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.
Why Perpetual recommends it
A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin’s Playing to Win, drawn from Lafley’s tenure as CEO of Procter & Gamble, is built around a deceptively simple premise: strategy is a small set of interconnected choices, not a plan, a vision statement or a budget exercise. The authors’ strategic choice cascade, winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, capabilities needed, and management systems, forces leaders to make explicit, specific choices rather than hiding behind vague ambition.
The book’s most useful discipline is treating strategy as a set of testable hypotheses rather than a fixed plan handed down from the top. Lafley and Martin push leaders to ask what would have to be true for this strategy to work, and then go test those assumptions directly rather than assuming confidence is the same thing as being right.
They’re also unusually honest about the discomfort of real strategic choice, choosing where to play always means consciously choosing where not to play, and most strategic failure comes from leaders who try to avoid that discomfort by attempting to compete everywhere at once.
We reference this cascade constantly in our own strategy and transformation work, because it gives leadership teams a shared, concrete language for choices that often stay dangerously vague in typical strategy conversations.
- Strategy is a cascade of specific, interconnected choices, not a plan or a vision statement
- Treating strategy as testable hypotheses beats treating it as fixed certainty
- Choosing where to play always means consciously choosing where not to play
- Trying to compete everywhere at once is usually a sign of avoided strategic choice
A useful exercise for any leadership team is running your current strategy through the five cascade questions explicitly, and noticing which ones you’ve never actually answered out loud.
We give this book four and a half out of five stars.
