Tag: A.G. Lafley

2013 Holiday Book List

Friday, December 13th, 2013

I’ve read dozens of business books this year, and reviewed at least one each month for OPEN. If you’re looking for a thoughtful gift for the business book-lover in your life, you simply cannot go wrong with any of these 15 picks!

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, by Daniel H. Pink. Bestselling author Pink argues that selling has changed more in the past 10 years than it did over the previous hundred. “We’re all in sales now,” Pink says. “One in nine Americans—some 15 million people—make a living trying to get others to make a purchase. But the other eight in nine work in sales, too—we’re persuading and influencing others to give up resources in exchange for something we have.”

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin. Martin, one the world’s foremost authorities on strategy and former dean of the progressive Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, teams with one of the top CEOs of all time, Lafley, of Proctor & Gamble. Together they boil strategy down to two critical questions: Where to play? How to win?

Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation, by Debra Kaye. Innovation demands looking at the world differently and finding connections between seemingly disconnected things. According to Kaye, the book’s theme is based on an Oriental legend, which she believes provides a powerful metaphor for the way in which the right connections can lead to brilliant insights and ultimately result in commercially viable innovations.

What’s the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, by Brian Solis. Solis argues that now is the time every business must go beyond price, performance or value. “The future of business is about creating experiences,” Solis writes. “Products, programs and processes that evoke splendor and rekindle meaningful and sincere interaction and growth. At the center of this evolution—or (r)evolution—is the experience.”

The Fearless Front Line: The Key to Liberating Leaders to Improve and Grow Their Business, by Ray Attiyah. Attiyah argues that all too often, the front line activities of a business are so unpredictable, unreliable and complicated that business owners and leaders can’t seem to pull themselves away from them. But if you’re spending most of your time on the day-to-day operations of your business, you’ve left a critical gap.

Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers Into Fanatics, by Jackie Huba. The author argues that Lady Gaga hasn’t just created a brand but cultivated a fanatical group of consumers—”Little Monsters”—that will follow her for the next two decades of her career and beyond. Huba distills seven key strategies from the Gaga approach.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The bestselling Heath brothers expose what’s wrong with how decisions are made by our political and business leaders, and by us individually in our personal lives—from how much we save for retirement to choosing a job, spouse or college. By curating the latest psychological research, the authors first reveal why our brains are hardwired to make foolish decisions.

CTRL ALT Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It, by Mitch Joel. According to Joel, we are in business purgatory, but he believes there’s a way of navigating out of it: reboot. Hence the title, a retro reference to the original Windows keyboard combination you’d use when your computer was frozen. Rebooting never moved you forward, but it did allow you to regain stable footing and position you to move in whichever direction you wished.

Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic, by Bill Jensen. Using the real-life stories of not only well-known business figures and founders but also everyday innovators who’ve created everything from a Craigslist for people with disabilities to a Pakistani school for young boys who had been indoctrinated into the Taliban, Jensen’s interviews offer an inside look at the character of some of today’s greatest change makers.

The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets, by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits. The authors describe why our economy is primed for a new wave of entrepreneurship using new methods of disruptive innovation, then go on to provide real-world examples of how entrepreneurs are creating new markets and disrupting others. This books shows anyone interested in starting a new business or launching a new idea how to get started creating value.

Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential, by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut. Everyone wants to know how to be more influential. But most of us don’t really think we can have the kind of magnetism or charisma that we associate with someone like Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey or Jon Stewart unless it comes naturally. According to the authors, however, it’s something we can learn, and they show us how in a book that’s already being taught at Harvard, Columbia and Georgetown.

Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business, by Bruce Poon Tip. Looptail is Tip’s extraordinary first-person account of his entrepreneurial instincts to start and develop G Adventures, a highly successful international travel adventure company. Along the way, he reveals his unusual management secrets that not only keep his employees fully engaged but also keep his customers extremely happy.

The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas, by David Burkus. Much has been written about creativity in business in an effort to understand just how great ideas are born, and much of it is just plain fiction, according to the author. Based on the latest research into how creative individuals and firms succeed, Burkus sets the record straight on 10 popular but mistaken beliefs.

Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D. An internationally recognized personality expert exposes the dark side of confidence and offers a strong case for the upside of negativity and pessimism. Chamorro-Premuzic shatters much of the conventional thinking about confidence with compelling scientific research. The bottom line: Confidence is overrated.

Create Your Future The Peter Drucker Way, by Bruce Rosenstein. Rosenstein knows more about the most acclaimed management thinker of all time: the late Peter Drucker. He spent many hours with the man, and is both a student and scholar of “the Drucker way.” Drucker was always ahead of his time, but he wasn’t always easy to read, follow, or apply. That’s where this book come, because the author does just that.

NOTE: Republished in slightly different form from my OPEN column.

Playing To Win: How Strategy Really Works

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

Business strategy is something that eludes most people. But having the right strategy is often the difference between failure and success. Given the high rate of failure for small businesses, strategy is something that simply must be understood. And a new book just arrived in stores that delivers the one thing every entrepreneur needs when it comes to strategy: simplicity.

Roger L. Martin, one the world’s foremost authorities on strategy and dean of the progressive Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has teamed with one of the top chief executives of all time, A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Proctor & Gamble, to publish a must-read book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works.

What Is Strategy?

Strategy means different things to different people, and most think about strategy in rather ineffective way. Some define strategy as a vision, some as a plan. Others define it as optimizing the status quo, or perhaps following best practices. Still others deny that strategy is possible, especially in times of great and rapid change.

But, argue the authors, strategy is really about choices, and they define strategy simply as “an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm it its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.”

“It is only through making and acting on choices that you can win,” they write. “Yes, clear, tough choices force your hand and confine you to a path. But they also free you to focus on what matters. What matters is winning. Great organizations—whether companies, not-for-profits, political organizations, agencies, what have you—choose to win rather than simply play.”

At the heart of the integrated set lie two key choices:

1. Where to play?

2. How to win?

“These two choices,” write Martin and Lafley, “are tightly bound up with one another, form the very heart of strategy and are the two most critical questions in strategy formulation.”

Playing To Win makes answering these questions in a winning way accessible to all, through a simple framework that’s both easy to understand and easy to use (see image).

choices

Where To Play

Once you are clear on the goals, aspirations, and purpose of your enterprise–the value you bring, why you exist, and the problem you solve for the world–you must choose a playing field that allows you to achieve those aims.

Answering the “Where to play” question helps narrow the competitive field and focuses on where your company will compete. It encompasses markets, customers and consumers, channels, product categories, and vertical stages of your chosen industry.

“This set of questions is vital,” argue the authors. “No company can be all things to all people and still win.”

Highlighting the practical application of this approach is terrific first-person storytelling by Lafley. He describes the three critical where-to-play choices P&G had to make at the corporate level: First, grow in and from the core businesses, focusing on core consumer segments, channels, customers, geographies, brands, and product technologies. Second, extend leadership in laundry and home care, and build to market leadership in the more demographically advantaged and structurally attractive beauty and personal-care categories. Third, expand to leadership in demographically advantaged emerging markets, prioritizing markets by their strategic importance to P&G.

The third choice was so important for P&G that by 2011, 35 percent of the company’s total sales came from the developing world.

How To Win

While answering the “Where to play” questions selects the playing field, the “How to win” question defines the choices for winning on that field.

“It is the recipe for success,” write the authors. “The how-to-win choice is intimately tied to the where-to-play choice. Remember, it is not how to win generally, but how to win within the chosen where-to-play domains.”

To determine how to win, you must decide what will enable your company to create unique value and sustainably deliver that value to customers in a way that is distinct from the firm’s competitors.

For example, for the Olay brand of P&G, the how-to-win choices were to “formulate genuinely better skin-care products that could actually fight the signs of aging, to create a powerful marketing campaign that clearly articulated the brand promise (“Fight the Seven Signs of Aging”), and to establish a “masstige channel.” In other words, working with mass retailers to compete directly with prestige brands. As the authors tell it, the masstige choice “was a decision to win in the channels P&G knew best, required significant changes in product formulation, package design, branding, and pricing to reframe the value proposition for retailers and consumers.”

Playing To Win makes it clear that strategy need not be the opaque, complex mystery many business professionals think it is. In fact, after reading Playing To Win, I was able to capture my own company’s winning strategy on a single page.

Adapted and reprinted from my OPEN column.