Roger Martin: How five questions reveal a winning strategy

Strategy is the coherent combination of decisions about aspiration, where to play, how to win, capabilities, and systems that together compel customers to choose you; if these pieces don’t reinforce each other, you don’t have a real strategy.

Martin highlights Procter & Gamble brand managers as four levels down from the CEO yet making pivotal strategic calls; if people ‘in the guts’ of the org don’t make good choices, brands fail and future leaders never develop.

Companies that aren’t clearly differentiated or structurally lower cost inevitably get squeezed by competitors like Southwest, Lego, Vanguard, or P&G, who can either command preference or sustain lower prices profitably.

Starting from “there’s a big market over there, we want some” is weak; Martin insists aspiration and where-to-play decisions should be grounded in real unmet or poorly served customer needs you can uniquely address.

Durable advantage comes from hard-to-replicate capabilities (e.g., Westlaw’s annotated case law, Four Seasons’ low turnover service culture, Southwest’s operating model) and the systems that sustain them, making rivals conclude “life’s too short” to copy you.