
If you want have a good conversation with business executives --- whether you are a salesman, consultant, mid level manager or even an individual contributor --- you need business acumen otherwise you will quickly lose credibility with them. The antidote to losing your credibility with C-level types is to read "Playing To Win" by A. G. Lafley and Roger Martin.
The business executives expect you to understand them in the way they think and approach their business, which means you have to know and talk strategy with them. As business executives they know that in order to win, a company needs to develop a solid strategy, execute flawlessly and deliver excellent customer experience. If they do this well, their companies will thrive and, if not, they will quickly become irrelevant.
This book will help you understand how to have a productive conversations with business executives because you will know how important strategy is to them in gaining competitive advantage. The book dissects it from the very top, which is that strategy is all about winning and then goes deeper on why, what and how of a strategy which will not only give you gravitas when you talk to business executives but also learn how to apply it to your unique situation.
Again, the main idea of this book is that you are in business for one thing: "You play to win the game." The authors define a business strategy simply as a set of choices a company makes to win.
The book is based mainly on what the authors learned at Proctor & Gamble when A;G. Lafley was the CEO. Working with the leading business and management thought leaders, a strategy consisted of coordinating and integrating the following five choices:
- What is a company's winning aspiration?
- Where should the company play?
- How should the company play to win?
- What are company's core capabilities?
- What are company's management systems that has to be leveraged?
The authors explain on how these choices were used with various examples, including Olay, innovation in outsourcing, integration of Gillette and others and various techniques used to reach a strategic decision.
This is not a book you read, but study before, during and after so you get the most out of it and start creating your own playbook on strategy that is applicable to your specific situation.
I highly recommend this book since it is a distillation of years of research, experience, collaboration and results where the authors clearly take you inside the corporate "war room" where they consider various options before making a decision and then walk the readers through the results of the strategic decision.
Though picking top 10 business books is tough since there are so many good business books written, but I feel this book definitely belongs in everyone's top 10 business books list for 2013.
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