YouSaid · the spoken record

Roger Martin

lines on the record: 85
first: 2024-07-25
most recent: 2024-07-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Who will end up saying, I'm kind of operational. I don't do strategy well, which links to our last thing about betterment. Just work on making different choices to solve problems. Not problems that I see. I'm not going to define your gap. It's one that you feel in your heart. I wish this were better. Work on it. And if you do that, you'll be a great strategist. So be encouraged. Don't be discouraged. And the worst thing to do is to wait. People say, well, I've got all these operational concerns right now, and then I'll get to strategy later. Eh, you'll never amount to anything. Nobody says that ever amounts to anything.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the like. And then I realized that he had been practicing strategy for decades before he became the CEO, decades. And so he just had more reps when he became CEO than almost anybody else that I've ever met. There's another guy, Juren Vign Nustrop, CEO or ex-CEO. Now he's gone on to a higher level Lego brand group would be similar. Great strategist that I have met. Have all one thing in common. They just practice. And anybody, there's no such thing as a person who is willing to practice strategy.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, on strategy, there's one piece of advice I'd say. People often ask me about people who are natural strategists or they say, I'm not naturally good at that, I'm more of an operational guy or gal. And what I tell them is I have never met this mythical beast called a great natural strategist. And they often throw back in my face laughly. They say, look, laughly. He was known as a strategy genius, right? And I say, yeah. But when I interviewed him in depth about his background for a paper I was writing, what I discovered was when he was in the Navy as a whatever, I don't know, probably 25-year-old in the Navy. He had a job where he had to think about strategy and was testing things out and doing things.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, lots of what I think about in strategy is sort of natural, if you will. I try to ask, how does the world generally operate? And is what we're doing kind of consistent with the way the world generally operates or not?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because in some sense, it's the biggest gap, the gap between what the customers, students, wished for, and were getting. And he would just replace it with something. He would try something else and replace it with that. You say, and that gets you like Professor of the Year every year. And the answer is yes betterment. Because if you're teaching for 25 years, right, and you just keep doing that every year, every year. Course keeps getting better and better and better and better and better and better so Betterment, you know, it doesn't make purists feel awesome But I'm not here to make purists feel awesome. I'm here to help people get better.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next gap. And if you do that all the time, right, you're always working on the next scab the next, they'll get smaller and smaller over time. I don't know if this is a great analogy, but I was a dean of a business school for 15 years, the guy who won the Professor of the Year award more times than anybody else and did it sort of teaching tough courses, often executive MBA courses and the like. Had a simple formula for doing it, right? Which is he taught second year courses and second-year courses happen to be 13 two-hour kind of lectures or sessions of one sort or another. He just pulled the students on what they thought of each session as they went along. And regardless of the reason, regardless of anything else, simply chopped number 13 every year.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customers used to do this and they're doing this. I can't find this kind of resources or distribution channel is abandoned us. Whatever is the most painful thing. And then just tackle that and say what different choices could I make? And I'd say use my cascade. What could I change where I'm playing? Could I change how I'm winning? Could I change my capabilities? Could I change my management systems in order to achieve a different aspiration? And so don't try to solve the problems of the world or even all the problems of your company. That's perfection. Betterment is making that gap go away. And guess what happens if you make that gap go away? You can turn your attention to the next gap and the next gap.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I call a gap. There's a gap between those two. And you should just conceptualize it as your current outcomes are a natural result of all the choices you've made interacting with the competitive environment. And so you should reasonably assume that probably those outcomes aren't going to get a whole lot better because they are the way they are for a good reason, right? You're going to need to make a different set of choices to make that gap go away. That's what I would work on. I would just ask the question, what is the single most painful gap currently that I'm facing?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for me, strategy, this thing called strategy with, yeah, would people say, oh my God, oh my God, how am I going to do strategy, whatever. I just think of it as a problem solving tool, right? And what problem should you attempt to solve? You should attempt to solve something where Your current outcomes that you're getting. Are lower than the outcomes you wish you were getting.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More people are using it. So that's what I'd say to Google. I don't care how painful it is. Water flows downhill. The tide comes in. And you cannot stop that even if you're one of the most powerful three firms on the face of the planet.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so if you added up all those and said, what do you think? So, what's their share of smartphone operating systems, Microsoft? Last time I checked, it was 0.4 of 1%. Yeah, so effectively zero. How about pads? Apparently it's 4% there. So their share of people staring at a smart screen has plummeted. Plummeted. Why? Because water finds its own level. People said. There are these other ways of getting around this, and I'm going to take those ways. And I think the degree to which people use their smartphone for more things as a function of that smartphone is advanced so much faster than your PC operating system.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer I think is really clear Windows 95. Because that's when he took the graphical user interface that he bought rights to receive jobs and put it on. So he didn't have to do backslash, backslash. You could actually point and click That's a long time ago. Last time I checked, that's now almost 30 years, right? And so they just abused their customer. Their share of PC operating systems much lower than it was then? No. That's not the right measure of share. The right measure of share in my view in that industry is your share of minutes spend staring at a smart screen. That's what the share of operating systems that you should care about. And so what kind of smart screens do people now stare at? Most. Most. And what other one do they do? A lot of people stare at who really like them.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market cap, and they've got a near monopoly position on something they can hold back the tide. You see, the water finds a way to flow Think about Microsoft and its monopoly on PC operating systems or its near monopoly on PC operating systems. And I would argue that they abuse that kind of monopoly, right? Like I often ask people, when's the last Windows update that got you as a customer excited?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they're going someplace. And Vanguard did this right, Jack Bogle, the late Jack Bogle, he died now a couple years ago now. He did not like ETFs. He said ETFs are not as good for customers as mutual funds. And he had all sorts of good reasons for that. But the index ETF business started to kind of grow like crazy. And Jack had to relent and say, I don't think it's good for them, but they want it. And so, you know, they went whole hog into it and are the leading index ETF provider as well as the index mutual fund provider. But for a while they weren't, but he realized it was the tide and he was attempting to hold back the tide. So good luck. Good luck to you on that. So to me, if Google thinks they can, because of their power and the fact they've got a multi-trillion.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You may have to scramble like hell. You may have to suffer from kind of economic downturn. But if you think you can, like I always think of it, like we, I don't know if you did this as a kiddle, Lenny, but when we went to the beach on family trips, we would have four brothers. We would build a baby girl later, but we would build sand castles and try to hold back the tide, like this would be in Florida or California, try and hold back the tide. And we'd come the next morning to see if our castle. And it was always gone. It's like gone. But we keep trying doing it. And it's sort of like, you can't hold back the tide. Maybe it can for a while, but you can't forever. So you just have to figure out where are the customers going.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were like, and he just said, we don't do anything special for them that we wouldn't do for you. They ask for things that you don't ask for because of their business model, but if you come to us with ideas of how we can help you serve our joint customers better. We're all in, but we're not boycotting. A place that customers have shown they want to shop as long as they're of an honest Amazon with sleazy and dishonest or whatever. But an honest upstanding place where customers can get our products. And so that's where I'm at, which is.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“EGU laughly, my friend, who I co wrote the book with, great CEO, was very good on this. And one of his big customers, big S customers came to him and said, if you don't stop cooperating with Amazon, we're going to delist all your products. Threat. Meji Customers want to shop there. We can't not be where our customers want to shop. And so if you feel you need to do that, you're going to have to because customers want to shop there and we're not doing that. What are you offended by that we're doing there? And they said, well, you're allowing them to ship products to their customers from your distribution centers. And AJ just said. Do you want to?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, no, I'm very interested in what's going on in AI and I'm writing some stuff on that. But I mean, it's hard. Like I've seen the inside of this for many of my clients. It is super hard when the guts of how you make money is under threat. And you just don't want that thing to go away. The big auto OEMs make money selling cars with ice engines. It's simple as that. And there's no surprise they've been doing it for 100 years or way down the learning curve. They have scale. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so these damn electric vehicles are kind of no fun. And so the Google situation you've described, I think it's similar. But my general advice is always the same, which is, you know, It can take a while But in the end, the customers will triumph.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They would have been just apoplectic. And so SD Lauder had to stay if that's counter positioning by Helmer's terms. They had to stay there. Was that stupid? No, they're still with all of their brands combined, the biggest in skincare, but clinique has lost leadership to our brand that they would have considered kind of nothing. Oil volt became Ole Pro v, regenerous, all of these higher priced products than they could ever imagine being sold in the mass channel. But our biggest friend was in some sense their distribution channel, which would have killed them if we literally, they would have just punished them so, so, so bad that they didn't do it.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If Estalotor would have taken their clinique brand and brought it into mass, they would have killed what we were doing. Simple as that. And in fact, Clinique was the biggest brand in all of skincare. We became the biggest brand in all of skincare. They didn't do it Why? Are they idiots? No, they're not. Este Lauter's super smart, but Este Lauder also has Bobby Brown and Mac and the Estee Lauder, Brandon, half a dozen more all in prestige. The prestige channel, if they'd have taken Clin And taking it over to mass would have done what? Shot them in the face.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sounds right. That's the cant thing. Awesome. Yeah. And Mike Porter, and he probably may quote Mike on that. Mike was very big on that. He said it's fault lines. You're trying to find fault line where it is so painful for your competitor to come across that fault line into your side. And so a great example of that would be Ole when at PNG and it's in the book when we did the repositioning of that. The competitor that could have killed us absolutely killed us was Este Lauder with Clinique. If they would have brought Clinique into the mass channel because we were doing a clinique kind of thing in the mass channels rather than the prestige. Prestige is like the first four of the department stores, right, which all, or Sephora are Alta.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crappy Southwest. So to me, that's the ultimate. The ultimate is it's like the ultimate weapon is the one you never use. The ultimate way to compete to win is to never actually be forced to compete.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wouldn't you kind of say gee, I'd love to be like that? But what does it mean? Well, it means selling off most of your aircraft so that you can have only one kind of aircraft, 737s, tearing up your entire root structure, your entire hub and spoke structure and make it point to point. Of changing your complete labor relations strategy from fighting the unions to paying them a lot as long as they're highly flexible. People think Southwest is non-union, it's not as unionized as it, but they do different. You have to essentially fire all your travel agents and convince your customers to book online by themselves to save more money. It's just too short. So they try things like continental light or TED that do half the things that Southwest does. And then your what?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely different capabilities and management systems. It'll encourage people to choose a different where to play how to win. If your capabilities and management systems are very similar to your competitors and you're succeeding with your chosen where to play out of win, what are they going to do? They're going to drive straight to your where to play and try to win exactly the same place and wreck your market for both for both of you. That's what you don't want and the more sort of complicated in some sense. I shouldn't use complicated, the more nuanced that and multifaceted your capabilities and management systems are, the more likely they're going to say life's too short. That's what everybody says about Southwest. So, if you're the only airline in the United States that's earning its cost of capital for 50 years,”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They give up and die? No, there are other great chains Mandarin Oriental. My wife loves staying in Mandarin Oriental even more than four seasons often. But they've not said we'll replicate four seasons. They've said we'll pick a different wear. A different howe, and that's in the end, what you want is rather than complete overlap, right, where you've got concentric circles of people picking the same where you convince people to pick different wares. That's why people sort of say, Roger, how to win, that's so, so in politics, you know, because you're producing losers and then there's victims and all that. Oppressor and oppressor, it fits in the modern dialogue. And I say, no, what I want to do is encourage them to find someplace else to prosper rather than smack on top of us. And so if you have”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's somebody else going to do when they see how much money you make doing that? Bill Day polyethylene plant beside yours twice the size. Then you're toast. Why? Because the competitive advantage was too simple. But at four seasons, Got a sell off all hero hotels. You got to fire all the people involved in hotel development and everything. And actually the people in the business like doing that, you have to essentially get rid of your entire staff, start from scratch, paying them more than you do now by far, giving them more career security, giving them more training, giving them better uniforms, whatever, spending 10 times as much hiring them with the hopes that maybe someday you'll be able to produce the kind of services for seasons does. Competitors basically say life's too short.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's where there is this modern sort of unfortunately bullshitty thing that says, oh, all competitive advantage is fleeting in this modern, hypercompetitive world and you can't have long-term advantage anymore. And I just say, oh, I see so four seasons. I guess, yeah, I guess that isn't very long term. That has only been 45 years now since they, no, 35 years, I should say. Don't exaggerate since they went to that strategy. Oh, and Tide. So 77 years isn't a long time, I guess, either, because they've been the number one detergent for 77 consecutive years. I guess you're right. It's fleeting. Not, but what makes it fleeting is when you have one thing and one thing only. So let's say you build the biggest polyethylene plant in the world near a good feedstock source and you have the low cost position.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you're exactly right. You can call if you want how to win moat, right? Definition of your mode, and so capabilities and management systems are what both build and maintain the moat. And the maintaining is an important part because if you are the most successful, people are going to say, I want to do that too.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you deliver that really cool special kind of service with that? The answer is amounts giving ahead to enabling management systems. You have to have a different way of recruiting, a different way of onboarding, a different way of career development. And if you do all of those things. End up with a 10% turnover rate so that your people are there 10 years on average. And you can then get them trained up to deliver that kind of service. So that's the capability that you build in the people to be able to take more decision making at a lower level and treat the guests in a customized way that makes them feel that this wasn't by the book some rule book that this person just said, no, this is a good solution for my guest.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dominantly at home for their segment which was high end business travelers. They've traveled. They've stayed in one luxury hotel too many 20 years ago. And so we're going to have luxury defined as not grand architecture and decor and obsequious service, but rather we're going to define it as a service that makes up for what you left at home or at the office because people would rather be if they have to not be at home, they'd rather be at the office than in a hotel because they can be more productive. We need capabilities. We need staff, right, that can deliver on that capability. What's the problem for that? The problem is turnover in the hotel industry globally is 80% a year, which means that the average person you meet, the average staff person you meet in the average hotel is on their way to a 16-month career at that hotel chain.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we want them to feel like we're the easiest to deal with. Have to have capabilities to do that. It's just like, again, four seasons said the reason they're by far and away the most successful, profitable, best in all front luxury hotel chain in the world, biggest, best, most profitable, best employee, rankings, best guest rankings, all of those. Well, their how to win was they said people, if you talk to people who are in luxury hotels, they'd rather not be there. You'd say, wow, they're in the lap of luxury. Why would that be? Where do you think they'd prefer to be, Lenny?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess I'd ask myself a question kind of like. Is there kind of a learning curve to this where we could have better capabilities because we started earlier than anybody else and have more essentially cumulative experience? Is there kind of a way that we've figured out how to serve customers that make them feel tended to better by us? So we've got helpline. We've figured out how to do sort of the helpline because if it's sort of self-serve and that's how they get the product and then they've got issues with how to use it, they feel that we're just better. We're the best of all their providers at that. How to win is a theory of how customers are going to perceive us better if we're differentiator. And then it's what capabilities would have. To would we have to have to make that theory come true rather than just be a kind of a wish?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes an enormous amount of commitment to say we're going to go and we're just going to keep charging ahead on this. Whereas in differentiation, I think you can differentiate sometimes at lower scale and build yourself slowly towards higher scale. But the world, the business world is just getting so much more scale sensitive. Like when you think about the costs of differentiation, it's often spending on branding, spending on R&D R&D sort of innovation, those two are of the most scale sensitive elements of anybody's cost structure, right? And so being a nichey differentiator is getting harder and harder in my view.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not advice I give. I think they're both completely legitimate. Strategies. They have implications, right? So if you want to be the cost leader, it is rare that you can be the cost leader without having dominant scale in the territory in which you're operating. So if you want to be a niche cost leader, good luck to you. That's almost never going to happen. So Vanguard had to make a race to, you know, we're going to do indexing mutual funds and it doesn't exist now. We're going to do it and we're going to get gigantic and we can't let anybody get close to us in size because we want to have the lowest cost position. And so they are the world's biggest mutual fund company. And you sort of have to do that. And same with Southwest to really make that model work. They had to keep expanding and expanding to get bigger M&M Mars.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the workflow or we're more integrated, like Thompson Reuter, the company I was on the board of our advantage was we were better integrated into the workflow. You didn't have to sort of get out of your workflow to go use this product and then you get back in. We just said, what's your workflow? Oh, we'll integrate it. Is it better integrated into their workflow that makes their life easier? There would be questions possibilities like that that I would be asking. Essentially, you've got a theory there of how you're going to be better or lower cost.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, yeah. Well, you ask the question how can we solve, well, how can we either solve that problem at a much lower cost so we can always be a sharper price point than them? So if there are solutions, but they cost $50,000 a user because their costs are $30,000 a user. We can do this for $15 a user. And so we can charge 100 bucks per seat and absolutely annihilate the competitor by figuring out a less costly way to do it. Or there are other selections, but they make the user do all these things and it's ponderous and it takes a long time. We have shortcuts. We use AI to you just say a few words into it and they say, oh yeah, I know what you mean. And here it goes in the.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too easily And do I love just how controlling and everything? Apple is? Do I know, but what I say, oh, those poor apps, right? No, get your own distribution channel, buddy.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Value chain question like where in the value chain are you going to play? Yeah, where in the value chain that's exactly right and everybody has value chain questions. They often complain after the pack, like all the apps complain about what cut Apple is taking, but they made a choice, a value chain choice. We are going to design something that will appear on an iPhone or an Android device if that is, and then good luck to you. You can complain like crazy that they're taking so much of it and this is unfair and they've got a duopoly. Yeah, but you guys cooperated 100% in building that 100% never complained about it until you wanted a bigger piece of the pie. That was a vertical stage of value chain stage that you chose willingly. Nobody forced you to do it.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know Michael Dell and David Thompson and Bill Gates will own the hotels as an investment and they will be happy to have Four Seasons brand on their hotel and we will charge a management fee. That is a where-to-play choice. Even though somebody could say, well, you're a luxury hotel. You're like the other luxury hotels who serve luxury customers at a high price. Oh, no, no, no, no. No. They do it with a stack this thick. We do it with a stack this thin.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At what vertical stage is it like is it an integrated product where the whole thing from soup to nuts is it some upstream pieces that some people downstream, do we take pieces from other people and assemble them? So were the integrator? Those are all important where to play choices from my view because those make them kind of a big difference. four seasons chose a four seasons of the hotel company, luxury hotel, chose a completely different choice on the vertical stage where to play back in the 80s, they said we're going to get out of real estate development, so buying land and getting it zone for hotels. We're going to get out of construction, building hotels. We're even going to get out of the business of owning the land or the hotel. So that we can be awesome at hotel management. Rich people.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is sort of to what extent is it a finished product or a component? Because sometimes it could be we'd like to supply this component that could be integrated into other people's products. I mean, that's what Apple apps are, right? We don't sell them an iPhone, we sell them a component within the iPhone customers iPhone. Is that what we're doing here? Because then you have to ask questions about, oh, well, how does it fit in with?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just think those are tend to be stronger if there's a link. Because remember, what is strategy about compelling desired customer action, right? So everything sort of ties back to that. So then the where to play would be you just want to want to say, okay, what customers are we talking about or what parts of our current customers that we don't serve? Are we attempting to serve with that? And what product is it? Is it a finished product? Is it a component of product through what distribution channel would we sell this? This is another self-serve type product because I think Figma is mainly self-served, right? And so you choose that where and then say, how can we solve before we get to that?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that would be a better one. And you're speculating, I've asked you to speculate, so we don't know, but I like that one better, right? It's our aspiration is to satisfy core customers who love what we do but think it's too narrow. That if we could broaden that for them into this market, our customers would be very happy.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't love it to start. To say more. So there's a big market over there we'd like to get some terrible reason my view. The reason should be customers are bereft. Customers are lacking something that we can provide. This is why I hate most and most entries by foreign companies into China, they get their faces shot off. And the reason is the rationale is it's big. We could get some of that. So, I don't love it for starters. Now, I'm not saying that that will guarantee failure, but it's... If somebody gave me a review with a pitch deck for that, I would not invest. Well, I imagine you could.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their reason for thinking fig jam is worth investing in is. What do you think it is? Is it white space or is it crummy offerings in the market currently?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so you'd ask the question, sort of kind of what are we trying to accomplish, right? Are we attempting to create something where nothing sort of digital exists? People do this in pen and paper, or are we, and so we're trying to invent a category and then be transformative by making the user experience better? Is that what we're trying to do? Are there players already doing this and they're just not doing it very well? You'd want to sort of say, well, what are we trying to accomplish? And I don't spend a whole lot of time on that because you got to toggle back and forth between those five questions. But you have to have a reason for searching in a given space for where to play, how to win. And so what do you think there?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that, and he's smart, he's consistent, though, you know, everybody makes mistakes, right? And he did too, right? Stalin Brothers, US Air. It's, you know, anybody who thinks they can be perfect on strategy is delusional. And so even the very, very best, like Warren Buffalo's outstanding, arguable genius is going to sort of think, I think this is a moat and it's going to be ephemeral. But I, you know, any of us should be pleased to have a track record that would be anywhere close to that on really identifying modes because he has.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he categorizes them. And I've got to look into it some more because I haven't studied it to say whether I would concur that there are just seven or there are more My suspicion might be that there are more, but there may not be. They may be all clustered, there may be variants that cluster behind those. But I don't myself have a categorization scheme that says here's how you search for the moat.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life's too short, and that's the kind of capabilities you need to be able to say we'll win by having the searches that make the lawyer's job the most effective. And if it saves them time, it saves them money. And you don't need a huge law library. Like law firms used to have these huge law libraries, right? You don't need one. You need a terminal. We're actually now telling everybody's PC and you don't need a bunch of librarians to go and find the cases that you need. They pop up on your screen. That's a great case of competitive advantage.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All they'd have to do is hire 150,000 lawyers full time, and you'd have to create a numbering system and a keyword system that's different than West Laws. And then you'd have to do what West Law has done for the past 50 years, which is give it free to law schools so that they teach their students before they even get out how to use West Law and all, you know, no problems. It'll be easy, right? Nobody's even tried. Why bot”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source