Roger Martin
Strategy advisor, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, co-author with A.G. Lafley of Playing to Win, developed through their work transforming Procter & Gamble.
This library maps his body of work as an interconnected system. Start with Playing to Win (the book and worldview), Strategy Is Choice (his definition, and how it evolved), the Strategy Choice Cascade (the five questions) and Martins Three Laws (the distilled principles).
Working methods: What Would Have to Be True, Possibility Portraits, Strategic Narrative. Diagnostics: The Opposite Test and The Cant-Wont Test. What strategy is not: Playing to Play, Strategy Impostors, Operational Excellence Is Not Strategy. The philosophical foundation: The Aristotle Distinction, Strategy as Logic Not Analysis, Strategy as Craft. Making strategy real: Enabling Management Systems, The Barnacle Problem, CEO as Chief System Designer, Honing vs Transformation, Culture Change Is Retail Not Wholesale. Context and applications: Winner-Takes-Most Dynamics, Cheap Strategy, Corporate Purpose, Diversification and Advantage, Functional Strategy, BHAGs Through Martins Lens, AI and Augmentation. Case: the Olay Case Study.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
Our verdict: where Martin ends and the quarter begins
What Martin gets right, and few get as right, is the front of the problem: strategy is choice, choice compels customer action, and a plan that survives its own reversal was never a strategy. We run all of it. Where his work stops is deliberate, and it is exactly where ours starts. Martin names the fifth box, enabling management systems, and then, by his own account, leaves it to the operators. That box is the entire discipline of turning a cascade into quarters teams can run: OKRs as the instrument, graded retrospectives as the feedback, and the human coaching that builds the judgement Martin rightly says cannot be handed over on a slide. Our position, and it is the honest seam between his work and ours: Martin will get your choices right; whether those choices survive contact with a Tuesday is a goal-system problem he never claimed to solve. That is not a criticism of the work. It is the reason the work needs us after the offsite.
One line to keep: Martin ends at the fifth box; the quarter is where we begin.
Reading about method is not the same as running it. We install this system and build the capability that stays.
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