Hear an interview with
ROGER MARTIN at the Great
Work Podcast.you’re saying No to, which isn’t the person. For instance, if you
write down someone’s request on a bit of paper or a flip chart, you
can then point to it and say, “I’m afraid I have to say No to this,”
which is a little better than “I’m afraid I have to say No to you.”
Say Yes to the person, but say No to the task.
The Other Five Strategic Questions
There are an awful lot of books on strategy, and most of them you
can skip. If you were to go and grab just one book on the topic,
here’s the one I’d recommend: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley’s
Playing to Win. Lafley was Procter & Gamble’s CEO during a period
of great success (and was so good he came back for a second stint),
and Martin—former dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman
School of Management and a successful author—was his trusted
advisor. They break strategy down into just five core questions
that need to be answered—five questions that scale down to the
individual and the team, and scale up to a complex, global,
multibillion-dollar organization.
These questions are not linear.
Answering one will influence the answer to
the one that follows and likely to the one
that preceded it. It is the process of
working back and forth between them,
creating alignment between your answers,