PTW/PI All-Stars Book Club – Chapter Nine
The Motivation for Strategy
Welcome to Chapter Nine of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) book club. Again, in the spirit of a book club discussion, I have responded to all previous comments and will continue to do so. Of the 37 all-star pieces out of the 260 in the series, the randomizer picked The Motivation for Strategy as the ninth chapter. This one takes us back to the biggest category – practical advice on an element of either the Strategy Choice Cascade (SCC) or Strategic Choice Structuring Process (SCSP). You can find the whole PTW/PI series here.
My Reflections on This Piece
I very happily reread this piece on the first box of the Strategy Choice Cascade – Winning Aspiration. I think it gives practical advice on a strategy topic that is imbued with far too much unnecessary complexity. Readers seemed to appreciate its practicality and rated it highly.
Business seems to have convinced itself that best practice involves having statements on at least three of the following four items – a purpose, a vision, a mission, and an aspiration. As in many things in the realm of strategy, those four terms have very different definitions to different people. For some, they are synonymous while for others there are critical distinctions.
I have now been in the world of strategy for four and a half decades and I can safely say that I have never seen an example of a company whose strategy and/or performance was improved by having statements in multiple of these categories. I am not saying that it has never happened. I just haven’t seen it. And when I haven’t seen something in over four decades of watching, I start to question whether it exists.
When a company has a purpose and a vision and a mission, it feels to me as though there is a Shakespearian “methinks he doth protest too much” thing going on. I can’t help feeling that the company should stop pontificating about what it intends to do and get to work. And as with all communication, my inference is that if you can’t say it simply, your thought must not be that good.
That is why I go for one. I don’t care at all what you call it – purpose, vision, mission or aspiration. I use the word aspiration, but it would never bother me for someone to use purpose, vision or mission instead.
However, I do care deeply that the purpose/vision/mission/aspiration is about winning. That is why I use the term winning aspiration, by which I mean for some set of customers, you are preferred over any competitor – and meaningfully and sustainably so. If you don’t achieve that outcome, you are wasting your own time and energy, and that of your fellow employees. Those who don’t aspire to win get jerked around continuously by those who do because winners have the leverage to discipline losers – and do so routinely.
Some criticize me for being too aggressive by insisting on winning. They view that as too zero-sum. We win and our competitors lose. Isn’t that bad for society? That is what business and economics students are taught – that is, they are taught to converge in ways that generate a zero-sum game. But that is bad strategy!
But I argue the contrary. Good strategy DOES NOT produce a zero-sum game. Good strategy involves choosing a Where-to-Play and developing a powerful How-to-Win that causes competitors to choose a different Where-to-Play in which they can win too.
Good strategy results in more companies winning in more ways that collectively serve customers better today and in the future. The enemy, in fact, is NOT striving to win because that is a recipe for converging on sameness, which then becomes a zero-sum game.
In addition to an aspiration seeking to produce a win, it should also be motivational. It should be excite and inspire the company’s stakeholders generally – and, most importantly, customers and employees.
Think about the aspiration of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts – to be the #1 luxury hotel brand in the world. Is that motivational for guests? Would they want to stay in the best luxury hotel brand in the world? Heck yes. How about employees? Would they like to work for the best luxury hotel chain in the world? Heck yes. It is the plum job in the industry.
Or think e.l.f. Beauty who aims to “make the best of beauty accessible to every eye, lip and face.” Customers want to be in e.l.f.’s ecosystem and employees flock to try to get a job there.
How about “our aspiration is to maximize shareholder value?” Is that motivational to customers? No, they feel they have a big target on their back. Their only role is to fork over cash to help the company maximize shareholder value. Is that motivational to employees? Sadly, I don’t know anyone who rolls out of bed in the morning and tells their partner or kids: Gee, I am excited to go out and maximize shareholder value. Yes, it might be motivational to shareholders – until they figure out that the only way their value will be maximized if it has happy customers and employees. That is why that particular aspiration – vogue twenty to thirty years ago – has gone the way of the dodo bird.
Finally, the winning aspiration should be translatable and translated into measurable goals. If you can’t measure progress toward your aspiration, you won’t make progress toward it. That is why WeWork’s ridiculous aspiration to “elevate the world’s consciousness” was prima facie evidence that a short-sale was in order.
By the way, this creates an important tie between the first box – Winning Aspiration – and fifth box – Enabling Management Systems – of the Strategy Choice Cascade. A company needs an aspiration that is translatable into measurable goals. And then it needs to do the non-trivial work to do the translation into a system that enables tracking of progress.
While perhaps not as immediately exciting on its face for strategists as the Where-to-Play/How-to-Win choice pair, Winning Aspiration is a critically important element of strategy.
Reader Comments
There was a medium volume of reader comments – a dozen. As the 21st piece in the series, it has more comments than All-Star Book Club Chapter Seven, Strategic Choice Chartering, which was the 6th piece. But it has fewer comments than Chapter Eight, Why ‘Execution’ is a Bankrupt Management Concept, which was much later as the 105th piece.
I received plenty of thanks for clarifying the muddy waters of purpose, mission, vision and aspiration. More readers than not agreed with me that having only one of the four will nicely suffice. However, one strongly disagreed with me and argued that it is important to have a purpose and a mission and a vision. That is perfectly OK with me. I don’t think it is deadly. I just like elegant simplicity and worry that if it takes you three or four statements to explain why you are doing what you are doing, you probably don’t really know.
One said the following very well: “If we’re identifying goals at the winning aspiration stage, are you saying we should identify the management systems needed to measure those goals during the management systems stage?” That is correct and is proper bookending of the Strategy Choice Cascade.
One made a nice point that a strong Winning Aspiration should lead to positive selection bias in hiring. The company will be attractive to the kind of colleagues who will want to work toward that aspiration. Both they will be more likely to find the company and the company will be more inclined to select them, as potential employees motivated by the aspiration – a nice positive spiral.
Without further ado, the original article…
Chapter Nine
I get many questions about where purpose, vision, mission, and goals fit in the Strategic Choice Cascade, because its five boxes don’t include any of those terms. So, I decided to address that set of related questions in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece, my 21st in the series. I will begin with purpose, vision, mission, and winning aspiration and then address the question of goals. (Links for the rest of the PTW/PI series can be found here.)
Winning Aspiration
In strategy formulation, it is common to see an organization create statements for each of purpose, vision, and mission, or at least two of the three. While I don’t object to an organization having two or three of these statements, in my decades of work on strategy I honestly have not seen any positive value in having multiple such statements. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any consistent or common definition of the terms. For example, sometimes the vision is subordinate to mission and other times it is the opposite. And when there is an attempt to parse out into three separate statements what the organization is attempting to do, it strikes me as getting close to the how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin territory.
I fully agree that aspiring to win is the right posture - those who don't tend to end up on the receiving end of those who do. But for me, the more interesting question isn't whether the ambition to win is justified; it's how we define "winning" in the first place.
The definition is rarely universal. It shifts with the situation and with the person leading the charge. The same team facing two different environments will often arrive at two different winning aspirations - and two different leaders facing the same environment will just as often do the same. Context and character both shape the target.
This becomes especially visible in turbulent times. When the environment turns hostile, some organizations (wisely?) trim their winning aspiration to something more grounded: securing enough customers to stay stable, preserve cash flow, and survive the cycle. I don't see it as defeatism - rather calibration. The ambition to be meaningfully preferred over every competitor remains the destination; it just gets deferred until the conditions allow for it. Others, of course, read the same turbulence differently - they see disruption as the rare window when market positions can actually be reshuffled, and they press harder precisely when others pull back.
Neither reading is wrong. What matters is the honesty and clarity with which a leadership team defines its winning aspiration given who they are and where they stand - and then commits to it with full conviction.
While your definition of winning aspiration is crystal clear the whole concept of vision/mission is often very muddy. During my MBA several models were presented and what was the vision in one was the mission in another.
Then a few years ago it was all about "purpose". When I asked on LinkedIn how it differed from a vision I was usually told a purpose was an entirely different concept. Yet, when I probed the purpose crowd to articulate their framework 80%+ was already in Collins & Porras' model. The same ideas appeared just under another name.
Then a few years later came the North Star... defined by McKinsey as "a shared purpose and vision".
No wonder most purposes/visions/missions are so bland. People don't know what to put under it/them.