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In my now forty-plus years in business, I have found that most leaders do not like to make decisions. They'd rather keep their options open [...] I've also found that few leaders can truly define winning (A.G. Lafley, recently reappointed CEO and Chairman of P&G)[1] .
In some sense I don't care so much about people who say there isn't any (sustainable) advantage [...] I'd say the world isn't static, strategy isn't static but that doesn't mean that there isn't a way of thinking about the fundamental questions [...] that keeps you ahead of the competition (Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management)[2] .
The modern foundations for "Strategy 101" were laid in the early 1980s with the appearance of Michael Porter's seminal publications, Competitive Strategy (1980) and Competitive Advantage (1985)[3] . Together, they provided the basic principles and analytical frameworks to help strategists meet the challenge of how to secure sustainable competitive advantage.
Following the rise of the "back-to-basics" operational excellence movement of the late 1980s and the emergence of the resource-based view of strategy in the early 1990s, Porter felt that executives were losing sight of the fundamentals of strategy, and was prompted to pen his now classic 1996 article "What is strategy?" and his principles of strategic positioning in order to redress the balance[4] .
Several recent books have set out not only to reaffirm the relevance of these principles but to help make the ideas behind them more accessible to executive audiences, and the new book by A.G. Lafley (who was rehired as CEO of P&G in May) and Roger Martin, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works , is a very valuable addition to this effort[5] . As described by the authors, their book is "the story" of the transformation of P&G during Lafley's first tenure as CEO over the 2000-2009 period and of the "approach to strategy that informed it." When Lafley took over as leader in 2000, most of P&G's businesses were "missing their goals, many by a wide margin" and the "company was overinvested and overextended." So the new CEO was determined from the start to "get P&G's strategy right" and to get his team to understand that "strategy is disciplined thinking that...