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The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

190: Roger Martin - Playing To Win: Strategy Is A Choice

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Ryan Hawk

Careers, Business, Management

4.9 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Episode 190: Roger Martin - Playing To Win: Strategy Is A Choice

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The Learning Leader Show

"Strategy is about making specific choices to win in the marketplace.  It requires making explicit choices to do some things and not others."

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

  • Common themes of leaders who sustain excellence:
    • Relentlessly look at the future
    • They have a curious mindset... Always asking questions
    • They ask: "Is what we're doing sustainable?"
  • Why A.G. Lafley was such a great strategic leader
  • You should always ask the question, "How can I put myself out of business?  And think to innovate based on that answer
  • Marrying innovation and strategic thinking: the dangers of doing this
  • What era does all of our data come from?  The past... Think carefully about that
  • You cannot always "prove" innovation.  You can't always base the future on the past.
  • Aristotle -- Brought us analysis... How to prove/demonstrate something is true
  • You can't ever analyze how to change the world... Steve Jobs would say "Imagine the possibilities."
  • "Strategy is a choice.  Where to play and how to win."
  • Roger explains how to test if you have a real strategy
  • Best advice he's received and given:
    • 1) "Don't start on the easy stuff.  Do the hard tasks first.  If you work on the hardest problems, you'll find that the easier ones seem to disappear
    • 2) Less is more.  Figure out one thing you do really well and focus on it.
    • 3) "Don't intellectualize people."  "Don't try to fool them, treat them as people... As you would want to be treated."
  • Highly successful people make a list of the Top 10 things to do that day and tackle the toughest problems first
  • Managing what matters most -- Must have a strategy to know what's most important
    • Peter Drucker's work -- The Effective Executive

"Too often CEO's will allow what's urgent to crowd out what's really important.  It's wrong to define strategy as following best practices.  This creates sameness and sameness is not a strategy.  It's a recipe for mediocrity."

Continue Learning:

You may also like these episodes:

Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon

Episode 071: Nate Boyer - Green Beret, Texas Football, The NFL

Episode 179: How To Sustain Excellence - The Best Answers From 178 Questions

Episode 107: Simon Sinek – Leadership: It Starts With Why

Did you enjoy the podcast?

If you enjoyed hearing Roger Martin on the show, please don't hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me.

Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell

The Learning Leader Show is supported by FreshBooks: FreshBooks is offering a 30 day, unrestricted free trial to my listeners. To claim it, just go to FreshBooks.com/Learning and enter LEARNING LEADER in the "How Did You Hear About Us?" section.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:16.5

The only way to innovate is to use a different process which is imagining possibilities and then choosing one for which you can to the to the assembled group make the most compelling argument for and only companies that accept that and accept the limitations of analysis will be innovative companies. The ones that exalt analysis to the highest

0:26.2

level will never be innovative. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here.

0:37.4

I've been looking forward to this conversation for more than a year with

0:40.9

best-selling author, leadership mind Roger Martin.

0:44.8

He served as the Dean of the Rotman School of Management for over 15 years.

0:48.8

In 2013 he was named Global Dean of the Year.

0:53.8

His best-selling book titled Playing to Win,

0:56.8

he co-wrote with A.G.

0:58.6

Laffley, the legendary leader from Proctor and Gamble.

1:02.2

He has written 24 Harvard Business Review articles in

1:05.1

addition to that. On this conversation tonight I absolutely loved it. A couple of

1:09.1

the things we got into how to marry innovation and strategy and why we need to be careful when doing this.

1:15.6

Then the best advice he's ever received followed up by the advice he gives to

1:21.0

younger inexperienced managers when they come speak with him.

1:25.0

And then finally how to manage, how to truly manage what matters.

1:29.8

Ladies and gentlemen, I know you enjoy this one and get a lot out of it from Roger Martin.

1:40.4

Roger thank you so much for being here and welcome to the Learning Leader Show.

1:44.0

It's my pleasure, Ryan. This is a great thing, so I'm looking for good.

1:48.0

Thank you, thank you.

1:50.0

To get us going, question around people that you've studied, you've spent time around,

1:56.3

you've certainly been with some of the greatest leaders in the world, I would put you in

2:00.0

the category of someone who's distilled and found ways to sustain excellence.

...

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