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Publisher's Summary
This is A.G. Lafley’s guidebook. Shouldn’t it be yours as well?Winning CEO A.G. Lafley is now back at the helm of consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. If you want to know the strategy he’ll use to restore P&G to its former dominance, read this book.
Playing to Win, a noted Wall Street Journal and Washington Post best seller, outlines the strategic approach Lafley, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, used to double P&G’s sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion when Lafley was first CEO (he led the company from 2000 to 2009). The book shows leaders in any type of organization how to guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business successwhere to play and how to win.
Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors. They are: (1) What is our winning aspiration? (2) Where will we play? (3) How will we win? (4) What capabilities must we have in place to win? and (5) What management systems are required to support our choices? The result is a playbook for winning.
The stories of how P&G repeatedly won by applying this method to iconic brands such as Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze clearly illustrate how deciding on a strategic approachand then making the right choices to support itmakes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning.
Playing to Win outlines a proven method that has worked for some of today’s most celebrated brands and products. Let this book serve as your new guide to winning, as well.
What members say
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- David
- 02-12-2018
Must have for anyone who wants to see strategy at work
This is a such a practical guide for anyone who wants to understand strategy. I chose this book because I do not consider myself a strategic thinker and now use many of the strategies and questions asked in the book. A valuable resource.
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- Anonymous User
- 25-10-2018
Great tool
A really good insight into developing a strategy and a great tool in the arsenal
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- Darryl Clarke
- 15-12-2014
must read for any business wanting to win
this book is a must read for businesses of any size or market place. sage, concise advice from some of the best minds in business.
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- gallluke
- 20-07-2015
Good audio book
Great for listening to in the car. Have bought a hard copy, not overly complicated.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- G. Roukas
- 09-05-2016
Excellent and comprehensive book on strategy
I've been reading about strategy over the last 20 years from many authors and from many angles, but this is the first one that I think takes a really comprehensive view of strategy and the process of crafting one.
I noticed that some of the other reviews criticize the authors for focusing on P&G, but I think they're missing the point: P&G is a large and diverse organization, and illustrating how strategy works there covers a massive spectrum of businesses. Many will find that while strategic options don't look the same in their organization, the general lessons from P&G can be applied to just about any kind of business. And the authors do salt the text with examples from other industries where the nature of those industries create meaningful illustrations.
In all, I think this is an an extensive and extremely worthwhile book. I recommend it highly!
12 of 12 people found this review helpful
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- lniles
- 14-04-2015
The P&G Story
This book is all about the author's experience as CEO of Proctor & Gamble. It's a reasonably good exposition of a well-founded approach to strategy in that context, but there is virtually no discussion of how the approach might apply to other environments. In the end the book is a case study of the strategic decision-making process at P&G rather than a tutorial for a business leader.
14 of 17 people found this review helpful
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- rbn12
- 12-07-2018
Okay for strategy
Some of these things are straightforward. Although most of them seem short-termist, as is evident today. This is a good book to understand P&G businesses. There are probably better strategy books.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-05-2017
"This is how awesome we were at P&G"
Any additional comments?
The themes in the book are solid themes but the "key takeaways" were very generic..."so, we applied dedication and resources...". The book glosses over significant components of managing priorities in an organization. Resources constraints, cost benefit trade-offs, prioritization, cross-functional complexities, for example. Would've done well to include more related and detailed examples
5 of 6 people found this review helpful
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- J. Balash
- 02-05-2019
Overly long with no new insights. Don’t even bother
A very disappointing effort. Highly capable authors with an analysis that has little in the way of specific insights and is long on dated anecdotes. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the book, even though I really enjoyed Roger Martin‘s previous book On design thinking.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- Emerson White
- 21-10-2019
The word “massteige” should have appeared at most once
There is about two hours of really good material in this 8 hour audiobook. I understand that the author has a long history at P&G but many of the stories seemed less like valuable business parables and more like P&G as copy. The book was also highly repetitive.
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- Dandre
- 12-10-2019
typical business book
Some great advice and guidance for driving strategy through a large organization and brining focus to top priorities. The examples chosen are case studies in many business schools so if you have gotten an advanced degree then most of this is not new. The book is also quite dated because this does not really address the evolution of e-commmerce and the Gillette example is clearly not a great example of success.
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- Anonymous User
- 19-09-2019
Strategy and what it is - not a misused word
if strategy was a buzzword or never understood the clear definition, this book makes it very understandable what strategy is and how you set one up for your business.
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- Ismar N. Kaufman
- 05-07-2019
Mind changing
I have been a follower of "classical" strategy, the Porter way. I always had a difficulty to link theory to practice. This book is THE bridge that brings Porter to real world leaders. Full of examples, everything is very well explained, it's not a book for academics, it's written for the rest of us who are looking for a place in the market. Lafley and Martin show that choosing the place and how to behave there is key to business.
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- AJ Masv
- 22-04-2019
Required reading for business execs
This book does an excellent job capturing the essence of business strategy and providing interesting and relatable examples. Highly recommend.
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- Temi Mogaji
- 09-01-2018
Out dated but good
Some outdated frameworks like segmenting but very good knowledge you have to have. Overall good.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- JedHoll
- 27-11-2017
P&G focused
Interesting book but PARTICULARLY focused on P&G and rarely strays off the company for long. While some lessons from multinationals can be applicable to different situations - some can’t
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- multichannelblog
- 15-12-2015
Very useful and enjoyable to listen to
Excellent book with some particularly interesting stories about P&G. learnt a lot and will probably listen to it again!
4 of 6 people found this review helpful
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- Ramesh
- 06-09-2019
A must read for Business leaders and CEOs.
I have greatly benefitted from listening to this book and would strongly recommend all business leaders to read and deploy the suggestions in this book in their own business.
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- Ras
- 27-08-2019
cliches of brand management and strategy
Nothing interesting! It is very basic strategic marketing concepts that are chewed endlessly with examples from P&G. It is so boring that I could not finish.
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- Tejal P.
- 05-04-2019
Absolutely brilliant book.
Loved it! Highly recommended listen/read. tehre were so many parts that were light bulb moments. Clear and easy language and narration was very enegergetic.
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- Ed_N
- 19-03-2018
Biography of P&G
The book is pretty much a biography of P&G. Yes there are good golden nuggets, but more towards the end of the book and could have been done on 1/4 of the time. Even at 2x speed is a bit slow.