5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker)

Why are so many people bad at strategy? What's taught now in business schools generally sucks. People aren't prepared educationally, then they sure don't get prepared for it in companies. It's intellectually challenging and it's emotionally intimidating. You have something you call the strategy choice cascade. You have to have answers to five questions. And what's your winning aspiration? Where to play? How can you win? What capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't? And then what enabling management systems do you have to put in place for the most part in the leading business schools? It's illegal to teach that. Playing to win, you talked about there's kind of these two routes. You have to be if they're differentiated or low cost. There's no way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two. Is there anything else you wanted to just leave listeners with? I have never met this mythical beast called a great natural strategist. Great strategists have all one thing in common. They just practice. Today my guest is Roger Martin.

Roger is one of the world's most trusted strategy advisors. He's Professor Emeritus at the Rotten School of Management at the University of Toronto, where he served as Dean for five years. In twenty thirteen he was named Global Dean of the Year. And in twenty seventeen, he was named the world's number one management thinker by thinkers fifty. He's also the author of what many listeners consider their favorite book on strategy called Playing to Win.

I've gone a lot of requests to get Roger on this podcast, and I can now see why. This is the most tactical and fascinating conversation I've had on this podcast about developing a strategy, and that is a really high bar. We delve into the five questions that you need to answer to help you craft your strategy, how Hamilton Helmer, Michael Porter, and Richard Remelt's work fits into his framework and worldview. What people most often get wrong when they're developing their own strategy. The two options you have for how to win with your strategy.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.