Strategy Logic Flow

The “strategy logic flow” is a named framework in Playing To Win for testing whether a strategy holds together. It organizes the analysis around four dimensions: the industry (its structure and the attractiveness of its segments); customers (what channel and end customers value); relative position (how the company fares, and could fare, against competitors); and competition (what rivals will do in reaction to a chosen course of action). Worked through in order, these four questions are meant to pressure-test the strategic choices the book builds its method around.

It is the analytical companion to the book’s better-known “cascade” of five cascading choices (winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, management systems): the strategy logic flow supplies the external/competitive reasoning that grounds those choices in the realities of the industry and the customer.

Context: Playing To Win (2013), by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, draws on Procter & Gamble’s turnaround to present strategy as a set of integrated, cascading choices; the strategy logic flow is one of the book’s recurring diagnostic tools for stress-testing those choices.

Where this appears

• Playing To Win — introduces the four-dimension framework (industry, customers, relative position, competition) explicitly as “the strategy logic flow” for evaluating strategic choices.