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, and 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. 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, and there's kind of these two routes.

You have to be either 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 Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto, where he served as dean for five years. In 2013, he was named Global Dean of the Year, and in 2017 he was named the world's number one management thinker by Thinkers50. He's also the

author of what many listeners consider their favorite book on strategy, called, Playing to Win. I've gotten 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