Erik on Software

New Book Review: "Playing to Win"

New book review for  Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by A. G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013, reposted here:

The content of this book focuses on the transformation of Procter & Gamble (P&G) between 2000 and 2009, and discusses the approach to strategy that led to this transformation, leading to a doubling of sales, a quadrupling of profits, and an increased share price of more than 80 percent during that decade. The authors discuss that although many good strategic choices were made, the company also had its share of disappointments and failures. And most importantly, "no strategy lasts forever".

In my recent review of "Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (Second Edition)", by Kees van der Heijden, I mentioned that one of the best takeaways from what the author writes in that book is that "strategy is a highly dynamic area, full of fads and fashions that come and go", and that "copying ideas that 'work' for others is unlikely to be a winning strategy", because "success can only be based on being different from (existing or potential) competitors". The retrospective that Lafley and Martin provide in Appendix A would agree with these conclusions.

As explained by the authors, "strategies need continual improvement and updating", because as the authors have found, "competitors have copied P&G's strategies - on innovation, on branding, and the like - to an extent that renders P&G's resultant strategy less distinctive and decisive", and this is the challenge moving forward. In reflecting on its 175-year-plus history, the authors remark that "winning through distinctive choices is the always-and-forever job of every strategist", and if management continues to search for unique where-to-play and how-to-win choices that set the company apart, they should be able to further the success of the company.

Earlier in the text, the authors explain that many leaders tend to approach strategy in one of the following ineffective ways: (1) they define strategy as a vision, (2) they define strategy as a plan, (3) they deny that long-term (or even medium-term) strategy is possible, (4) they define strategy as the optimization of the status quo, or (5) they define strategy as following best practices. The authors argue that what really matters is winning, and that the play book discussed in this book, which provides five choices, a framework, and a process, is what is needed to win.

According to the authors, strategy is the answer to five interrelated questions: (1) What is your winning aspiration? (2) Where will you play? (3) How will you win? (4) What capabilities must be in place? and (5) What management systems are required? In chapters 2 through 6 of this book, the authors explain the nature of the choices to be made, provide a number of examples of each choice, and offer advice for making the choice given a context. These five choices comprise the "strategic choice cascade", the foundation of their strategy work.

In subsequent chapters, the authors present the "strategic logic flow" framework, designed to direct thinking to the key analyses that inform any strategy, and the "reverse engineering" methodology, designed to make sense of conflicting strategic options. In the former, there are four dimensions to be considered: (1) the industry, (2) customers, (3) relative position, and (4) competition. In the latter, which contrasts with traditional approaches to generating buy-in, there exist seven steps that involve exploring different ways forward and a wider variety of possible strategic choices.

As a consultant, I especially appreciated Chapter 1 ("Strategy = Choice"), which sets the stage by defining what strategy is all about, Chapter 7 ("Thinking Through Strategy"), which walks through industry analysis (segmentation and attractiveness), customer value analysis (channel and end consumers), analysis of relative position (capabilities and costs), and competitor analysis, and Chapter 8 ("Shortening Your Odds"), which explains that what is needed to find a winning strategy is to explore "what would have to be true" rather than "what is true", helping foster teams working together rather than battling one another, and surfacing differences and resolving them.

In addition, I appreciated the "Dos and Don'ts" sections at the end of each chapter, which clearly summarize the material from a practical context, as well as the strategic lessons learned side bars following these sections at the end of most of the chapters. At some level, I find the frankness that the authors share in these sections akin to how David H. Maister talks about his experiences in "Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy" (see my review), especially with regard to what Martin has to share at the end of Chapter 8 ("Shortening Your Odds"). Well recommended.

New Book Review: "R in Action"

New book review for R in Action: Data Analysis and Graphics with R, by Robert Kabacoff, Manning Publications, 2011, reposted here:

Quite a few texts on R have entered the marketplace over the last few years, so my decision to go with this text about a year ago was based on my survey of a number of reviews others have written for this and other books in this space, along with my personal experience with other Manning publications such as "Spring in Action", "Java Persistence with Hibernate", and "Hadoop in Action". In general, my experience working through this book has been pleasant, so I personally do not understand some of the complaints that other reviewers have made about the content that Kabacoff provides here.

That said, however, be forewarned that as with other texts, you should not expect to find all of your answers about R in this book. In my opinion, Manning publications are typically written in a format that fits well with the agile learning method with which I have grown accustomed during my consulting career. The author introduces topics along the way, sometimes more piecemeal that I would like, but his style forced me to explore other resources for more detail, bringing familiarity to other available resources. The number of plugin statistical packages for R has grown exponentially over the years (there are now over 2500), for example, so no book, not even "R in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (Second Edition)", which I purchased recently, should be expected to be a one-stop shop.

This text quickly brought me up to speed with R language basics working with data sets, and introduced me to specifics with regard to R statistical methods and visualizations. Using R 2.15.0 for Windows, starting with the small data sets the author provides with which to run his examples, as well as sample data sets that the R language itself provides, I soon found myself working with larger data sets that the City of Chicago makes publicly available via its website, followed by using R at work. Your comfort level will be greater or lesser depending on your experience working with data.

As someone new to R, but not new to working with data, I especially appreciated the first five chapters that encompass the first of four parts in the book ("Introduction to R", "Creating a Dataset", "Getting Started with Graphs", "Basic Data Management", and "Advanced Data Management"). Like it or not, but as with any language, most data work revolves around first getting it into the correct format. After these first five chapters, the author walks the reader through basic graphs and statistics, followed by intermediate methods such as regression and analysis of variance (ANOVA), and advanced methods such as generalized linear models and more advanced graphics than was covered earlier in the book.