XT…AG Lafley的战略剧本

The Five Essential Questions at the Heart of Any Winning Strategy bya.G.lafley,rogermartin and Jenniferriel The answers to these questions are the fundamental choicesevery leader must make to craft a successful strategy. Makeno mistake about it, strategyischoice; it is a set of choicesaboutwhat you will do, andwhat you will not do, so as to createadvantage over the competition. In this article, we will delveinto each of the five questions that make up the framework forsuccessful strategy. ForFar too many leaders,strategy is a struggle. Despite all thedifferent tools available (or perhaps because of them), strategycan seem mysterious and scary, with huge rewards for success,disastrous implications for failure and many unknown dangerslurking along the way. That needn’t be the case. We believe strategy can be definedand created using a simple framework that entails answeringfive questions — the same five questions, no matter the type, sizeor context of the organization: What isyour Winningaspiration?Most companies have aspirations, usually framed as a mission statement and vision. These corporate artifacts aren’t unhelp-ful to strategy, but too often they are abstract and lack context;they paint a pleasant picture of a possible happy future thatmakes no reference to competition, to customers or to winning.In order to be sustainable, an organization must seek to win in a 1.What is your winning aspiration?2.Where will you play?3.How will you win?4.What capabilities must be in place?5.What management systems are required? Where to play and how to win areintimately tied, and together theyform the very heart of strategy. pate in different channels (like B2B direct sales, online, or mass-merchandise retail.) It can participate in just one stage of pro-duction in a given industry, or be vertically integrated. Thesechoices, taken together, represent the strategic playing field foran organization. particular place and in a particular way, translating the abstracthappy future into defined winning aspirations. By way of example, considerProcter & Gamble, over the pe-riod 2000-2010. In this case, winning was defined as ‘deliveringmarket-leading, value-creating brands in every category and indus-try in which P&G chose to compete’. This aspiration flowed fromP&G’s statement of purpose, which read: “We will provide productsand services of superior quality and value that improve the lives ofthe world’s consumers. As a result, consumers will reward us withleadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, ourshareholders, and the communities in which we live and work toprosper.” P&G’s bold ambition was to create the kinds of productsand services that couldimprove consumers’ lives;if it could genu-inely do so, profit and value creation would follow. This choice ofaspirations drove all other choices in the organization. At P&G, the challenge on the where-to-play front was to de-fine which choices would give it a sustainable competitive advan-tage. As a massive multinational company, the very real tempta-tion was to attempt to be in all places at once, to be ‘everything toeveryone’. But such an approach produces a regression to the mean— an averaging out in whicheverythingis a priority, sonothingis apriority. It would mean investment so diffuse that there would beno capacity to build on the areas where P&G could truly dominateand win. It was important to determine where P&G capabilitieswould be decisive and where they would not — in other words,to understand what was trulycoreto P&G — and to invest dispro-portionately in those areas. As an organization, it chose to buildfrom its core strengths in order to win: from its core brands (aset of clear industry or category leaders), its core geographies(the ten countries that represented 85 per cent of P&G’s profits),its core retail customers and channels (the places consumersexpected and wanted P&G to be, including mass merchandisersand discounters, drugstores and grocery stores), its core tech-nologies and innovations (shifting from a pure invention mind-set to one of strategic innovation), and its core consumers (thosewho matter most to the organization, in the most attractiveconsumer segments.) Of course, winning aspirations for a consumer brand willlook different than for a market research department or a com-munity hospital. But every organization can conceptualize whatit means to win. Take that market research department, for ex-ample. Winning could mean being the service provider of choicefor its internal customers (as opposed to the mandated andmuch-maligned choice.) It might mean becoming a trusted advi-sor to organizational leaders, or owning the most sophisticatedand successful suite of consumer insight tools in the industry.But it should be more than simply ‘to serve the needs of internalcustomers’. That is a recipe for mediocrity. When an organizationsets out toplay, rather thanwin, it doesn’t invest appropriatelyand rarely makes the truly hard