Developing a Powerful How-to-Win

From Pixels to Portrait

Source: Roger L. Martin, 2025

I ran an offsite with a new client last week during which I had breakout groups work to build out strategic possibilities for their business units. The groups generally came back with weak How-to-Wins — not all, but on average they were mediocre. It means I have yet to crack the code on explaining How-to-Win in a practical, actionable way. So, I am trying again to see if I can do a better job in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece called Developing a Powerful How-to-Win: From Pixels to Portrait. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.

Previous Attempts

It is not as though I haven’t tried before on this front. How-to-Win (HTW) has been a consistent PTW/PI theme. But if I look back on the pieces, they haven’t hit HTW head-on. There have been a number of pieces on how HTW relates to other elements. For example I did a piece on how Where-to-Play (WTP) and HTW are inseparably related. And I did a piece on how HTW is related to Must-have Capabilities (MHC). Another piece was on the relationship between HTW and value proposition.

Then I did some articles on attributes of a HTW choice. One, which had a big impact, was on describing a strategy choice — including HTW — as one in which the opposite of your choice is not stupid on its face. Then I did a piece on the fact that for a PTW choice to be useful, it has to be based on MHC that pass the can’t/won’t test. Then finally, I did a piece on the purpose of your WTP/HTW, which is to compel customers to take desired action.

I have concluded that these many pieces haven’t done the trick. And my hypothesis is that my approach has been overly narrow — either relation to other elements of strategy or narrow attributes of HTW. So, I am going to tackle HTW as holistically as possible.

An Analogy

An analogy might help clarify.

When I give a team the task of coming up with a strategy possibility, the most common result that comes back is a list. It is a list of a very sensible things to do. A list is what my friend and former Steelcase and Ford CEO, Jim Hackett would call a pixel view. Each can be seen as a colored dot. A list is a set of random colored pixels. Each might be an important colored pixel — pixels of the sort you might need, hence, appealing pixels.

But a list of pixels is not what Hackett calls the portrait view — that is, pixels that have been organized with clear intent into a coherent picture as desired by the artist. Pixels don’t necessarily produce a portrait — unless the artist has the goal of a portrait in mind.

The analogy, then, is that the job of strategy is to paint a portrait, not to spew out an unconnected, if not random, array of pixels.

A Conception of a Strategy Portrait

The challenge then is to explain the concept of a portrait in the context of strategy. I would argue that it is a diagram that explains and illustrates how individual pieces fit together to produce the desired outcome. It is a portrait that helps to visualize a theory of winning.

It is a portrait for which the viewer can discern the desired outcome of the artist of these pixels working together, whether it is Picasso painting Guernica or Michelangelo painting the Mona Lisa, or van Gogh painting The Starry Night.

In strategy, that portrait is a set of things done together in a way that collectively generates a win that passes the can’t/won’t test. That is, competitors either can’t or won’t do the integrated set of things that would copy and neutralize what the company has done. Competitors might do some of the things the way the company has, but not all in the same way.

The Activity System

Michael Porter had a nice conception of a portrait in strategy that I will use as an example. It comes out of his 1996 Harvard Business Review article, What is Strategy? I think it is one of the top ten things that has ever been written on business strategy. [I will say, parenthetically, that the article is near and dear to me because I helped Mike with it, for which he thanked me in the article’s acknowledgements.]

To me, the new-to-the-world insight of the article was that sustainable competitive advantage — winning — does not arise from performing one activity well but by performing a number of activities together. The company doesn’t necessarily perform all the activities better than every competitor, but no competitor puts it all together the same way. In fact, it is daunting for competitors to even try because it involves making a number of activities work together seamlessly.

In the article, he uses IKEA, Vanguard and Southwest Airlines as examples of this kind of competitive advantage. For those who say competitive advantage is fleeting or no longer even possible, that was 29 years ago, and they are still all on top and haven’t faced someone who has tried to replicate all their activities.

In the article, he introduces the concept of the activity system, and it drew portraits of them — in the form of the graphic above right, which is the one that AG Lafley and I produced based on the P&G strategy choices circa 2001 and is shown in our book, Playing to Win.

In the wake of the article, I used to create activity systems like that a lot. But I found that clients didn’t take to it easily. There was always confusion over what exactly an activity is. And in truth, it muddled together three categories that I had separated in the Strategy Choice Cascade that I had created in the 1988–1995 period — WTP, HTW and MHC. For example, in the Southwest Airlines activity system in the article, one key node is “short haul, point-to-point routes between medium-sized cities and secondary airports.” In my vernacular, that is a WTP choice. Or for example, in the IKEA activity system, an activity is “in-house design focused on cost of manufacturing,” which I think of more as a MHC.

Consequently, my use the activity system concept with my clients tailed off. I wanted clients to distinguish between WTP, HTW and MHC. However, I may have been guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There were two babies not to be tossed out spuriously.

The first was the idea that sustainable advantage arises from a set of activities working together, not just one thing or a series of unrelated things.

The second, and more subtly, was that winning is a portrait.

My reflection is that I should have protected those two babies and thrown out the bathwater, which was the muddling of WTP/HTW/MHC. That is, use the activity system as a pictorial representation of HTW. As always, Mike’s thoughts add value!

Building a HTW Portrait

In thinking about building a HTW portrait — a picture of how we are going to be superior to competition in our chosen WTP (with which we iterate back and forth to optimize) — I believe four things must be kept in mind.

Never Lose Focus on the Winning Outcome

It is not a how-to-play or how-to-improve portrait. It is a HTW portrait, and the focus must be on a picture that illustrates a way of winning against all competition by doing an integrated set of things competitors can’t and/or won’t do. Nobody will remember or care about a losing or mediocre portrait. But they will remember and look longingly at winning portraits — as with the winning IKEA, Vanguard, and Southwest portraits in What is Strategy?

The P&G portrait is about winning in its chosen field of play — globally in its chosen set of consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories.

The Links are as Important as the Nodes

In the diagram above right, the most important activities (or choices in my interpretation) are the primary (blue) nodes and the supporting choices are secondary (white) nodes. But just as important are the connecting lines between the nodes, which suggest the connections between the nodes. The supporting nodes strengthen the primary nodes, and the primary nodes strengthen the powers of each other.

Individual activities that aren’t connected to other aspects of the HTW portrait aren’t strategic. They are just pixels and pixels are empty calories.

For P&G, scale enables greater investment in innovation and branding (two scale-sensitive activities) than competitors. Consumer understanding helps guide investments in innovation and branding to more productive ends. And scale enables go-to-market activities that competitors can’t match (e.g. multi-functional, co-located customer teams).

The Portrait Must Tell a Story

It must tell a happy story. There are no strategy portraits that are simultaneously sad and successful. Everything needs to hang together to tell a happy story of winning, in the chosen playing field to achieve the winning aspiration. If an activity isn’t a critical part of the story, it is superfluous. Get it out of the portrait, the purpose of which is to create focus not diffusion.

The P&G portrait tells the story that while some competitors can match some of the primary nodes, no competitor can match them all — and that has underpinned P&G’s multi-generational success.

A Good Portrait Will take Multiple Iterations

A good portrait won’t necessarily come together on the first attempt. That is why many great painters created models of their artwork before making a serious attempt at the final . I particularly enjoy when a museum exhibit shows the progression of a great work through a series of sketches or models. The artist learns from the modeling process how to make the portrait ever better.

In strategy, that means making the links clearer and getting the useless pixels out to create the greatest and clearest possible strategy. When AG started the exercise at a senior leadership offsite, the team generated a hundred potential nodes — way too many to produce a useful portrait. AG needed to work with his team to whittle down to the five primary nodes and thirteen supporting nodes — which created powerful clarity for the organization.

Practitioner Insights

Try to guard against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think I failed to do so with activity systems — even though I was part of the effort that created the concept. I now realize that the tool can be productively repurposed to create HTW portraits. Next time I work on HTW with a client, I am not going to ask them to create a theory of HTW. I am going to ask them to create a portrait of HTW, that shows how the elements of HTW fit together to create a portrait, not a confusing list of pixels.

If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, this may provide a HTW breakthrough in my work! I encourage you to try it too. Can you describe your strategy as a portrait not a list of pixels? If it is a pixel list now, see if you can transform it into a portrait.

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As a reminder, I previewed six weeks ago that I am doing a PTW/PI podcast series with friend Tiffani Bova. The second in the series is on LinkedIn on Wednesday, March 26th at 12 noon EST and 9am PST. Sign up for it using this link. Look forward to seeing you there!