Roger Martin

A coherent strategy requires answering five specific, integrated questions that work together to reinforce a central goal.

"You have to have answers to five questions. What's your winning aspiration? Where to play? How can you win? What capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't? And then, what enabling m..."

Strategy is a skill that must be practiced at every level of an organization, as front-line decisions often dictate the success or failure of a brand.

"I'm a big believer that people down organization have to make really important strategic choices or bad things are going to happen, if they make really great ones, good things are going to happen, and..."

The ultimate validation of any strategy is whether it successfully drives the specific customer behavior the company intends.

"Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action."

Strategic thinking is a learned skill developed through repetition and reps, not an innate talent.

"I have never met this mythical beast called a great natural strategist. Great strategists have all one thing in common, they just practice."

A winning aspiration must be rooted in solving a customer problem rather than just chasing a large market opportunity.

"Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action."

Sustainable competitive advantage requires a definitive choice between being the lowest-cost provider or being uniquely differentiated.

"You have to be either differentiated or low cost, there's no way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two."

A sustainable moat is built through the integration of multiple choices that are more difficult for competitors to replicate than a single feature or resource.

"Perhaps the thing that makes it intellectually hardest is that it is an integrative activity. It answers to a bunch of questions that have to fit together and reinforce one another."