Roger Martin, Dean of the
Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, was in Mumbai last week promoting his new book
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Written with A.G. Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and Gamble, the book explores how to design and implement a strategy for success, a key but often misguided step in business development.
He sat down for a Q&A with Live Mint, a division of the Wall Street Journal, to discuss the book and its themes in more detail. Martin is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School and worked Procter and Gamble before becoming Dean at Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He will be ending his term there later this year.
"Most companies don’t have a conscious strategy," he told Live Mint. "They are just doing a bunch of stuff that doesn’t add up--they don’t have any useful strategy. They might say 'we are going to be the best in the industry; and they think being the best in their industry is a strategy--it’s not. It’s a slogan."
So what is strategy? It requires CEOs to have a clear vision and an understanding of the company's customers.
Martin says, "Strategy is an integrated set of choices that produces an outcome. It defines where we are going to play--if a CEO can’t define that, he or she probably does not have a strategy worth having. Saying we want to have the good customers is a non-choice; instead, if you say, for instance, we want customers who value variety over low price, that’s coherent. That way you can organize yourself to have high variety--to have a value proposition to that customer base that is distinctive."
Read the full story
here.
Original Source: Live Mint