Lafley & Martin's 5-Step Strategy Model
Playing to Win is a cascade of five choices - winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, what capabilities, what management systems - where each answer constrains the next, so you can't skip to tactics before deciding where you're actually competing.
Five boxes cascade downward, each answer narrowing what's still open in the box below it.
Reach for this when…
- You're bidding for every opportunity that comes in rather than choosing where to compete.
- Your team can list activities but can't say what winning would actually look like.
- Capability investment decisions keep getting made without reference to the strategy.
How to run it
- Winning aspiration: define what winning means, specifically.
- Where to play: choose the markets, segments and channels you'll compete in, and rule out the rest.
- How to win: decide the basis on which you'll beat competitors there.
- Capabilities: identify what you must be good at to win that way.
- Management systems: put in place what will sustain the choices above.
A worked example
Situation. Aigerim Bekova runs Bekova Contact Solutions, a BPO company in Almaty, Kazakhstan, that had been responding to every RFP regardless of fit.
Applied. Working the cascade, 'where to play' was the hard choice: mid-market SaaS support contracts, not enterprise, not retail. 'How to win' followed from that: bilingual agents and faster onboarding than the larger India-based providers, not lowest price.
Result. She won three mid-market contracts in the following two quarters by bidding on fewer, better-fitting RFPs instead of chasing volume.
The catch
The cascade looks tidy but each choice genuinely constrains the next, and going back to revise 'where to play' after you've built capabilities for a different answer is expensive - the model doesn't warn you how costly that reversal is. It also assumes you can articulate 'how to win' clearly, which is harder than it sounds in commodity markets.
If your 'how to win' is 'work harder than the competition', you haven't answered the question.
Origin: A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin