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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Go on to West Law and put in some search terms using a West Law keyword system to help with it. And you get the five cases that really matter. You can Google it and do the same thing and you'll get the 500 cases that might matter. So how does West law do that? Well, for now over a hundred years, they've taken every case that's come out of the US legal system, had a lawyer, a Westlaw lawyer, write a head note that summarizes what's in the case using these keywords so that they were searchable. And today, to do 2024 takes 1500 full-time lawyers. So, if somebody else said it, you know, it's Westlaw business, it's incredibly profitable and it keeps growing and it's awesome. I'd like to be in that business.”
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, you have to answer a second question, I guess, which is, here's the way I'm going to be better and here's the way somebody else isn't going to be able to simply replicate that quickly, right? Like one of my favorite businesses, because I was on the board of, I was on the board of Thomson Reuters for 14 years. It was Thompson first, and then he bought Reuters of Thompson Reuters. Best business as a business called Westlaw. And the dominant provider of online legal searches. So if you're a litigator and you're trying to getting ready for a case and you need to know what are the important precedents for this case.”
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 they don't do anything for 10 years giving Amazon the scale so that Amazon then has this huge scale advantage kind of on this and network effects and voila. You've got a competitive advantage that you didn't necessarily kind of completely deserve. You needed the help of the player who stood to lose the most to hope that it wasn't going to happen. Same with Tesla. Tesla got a 10-year head start. Not because the OEMs couldn't, they could have. And of course, GM did many, many years ago, right? Great fully functioning electric vehicle, but they couldn't figure out how the hell you make a buck on it. And so they didn't do it giving Tesla the ability to establish a brand. That people associate with that electric vehicle equals Tesla and get them allow them to jump way ahead and then have the scale that is hard to others to match.”
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 didn't. They said, I hope this online thing doesn't really take off because that would be a pisser because we've got 5,000 stores across America and we've got all that. And that would be really a bummer.”
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 won't, right? Like, do you really think Walmart couldn't have built as good a website as Amazon and a massive scale? I think they could 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
“It is mainly understanding customers kind of as well as you can and then saying, is there a way to be distinctive against that? And there are There are lots of ways to do it, but it's tied very closely to the capabilities, right, which is if you have a way of winning, right, you say my word to play is I'm going to sell pet food on the internet. And my how to win is I'm going to kind of be the best. But it turns out that anybody can build a website can sell pet food on the internet. And in fact, you know, 20 of them do it almost immediately and they all go bust. You don't have the capability. So you've got to ask yourself the question, can I serve a particular customer need with a set of capabilities that are going to be hard to replicate by my competitors? They either can't do it or they won't do it. And both are important questions because sometimes”
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 had great advertising. I always loved the advertising that they had when they entered, they did maps of Boston and said, if you live in any of these places, kind of the south, the west of Boston, it takes you less time to get from your house to the gate than it does to go to Logan because at Logan, right, you're kind of park in a parking garage and then lock half an hour. And then when you get through security, you still have to walk 20 minutes, blah, blah, blah, and add Providence if you've ever flown out of Providence. You can park about 100 yards from the gates. And so they just had to say, we can't stop that. Not everybody's going to do it. Bought a whole bunch of people, and there's nothing we can do to stop 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
“Yep. Awesome. Right. So while I was living in Boston, they entered the Boston to Chicago route, which was a duopoly of American and United at the time. And the price was about, in those days, like a thousand bucks for a round trip because it was a nice duopoly. Would Southwest come in? They say, we're going to fly Providence to Midway, not Logan to O'Hare. And it's going to be 200 bucks.”
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 you're going to get your 30 share or 35 share of passengers on this route. Welcome to town. That's all they can do. They just have to cede position. And that's what happens if you play to play, Ewell end up just being, I mean, it's literally like having a bully who can just shove you and you take one step back, then they shove you and you take another step back and they shove you and you take another step back. No way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two. You cannot bully Vanguard. You cannot bully Southwest. You cannot bully Procter& Gamble. You cannot bully Lego. That's the way the business world works.”
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, or get out of business, whatever. Like, you know, it's only a matter of time till you're dead, right? Is the sad kind of truth of the matter, which is the competitors in your industry who are either low cost or differentiated can essentially jerk you around as much as they want. It's like Southwest Airlines, right? Like Southwest Airlines was just a tiny little airline that flew Austin, Houston, Dallas. And now it's number one in passenger seat miles in America and the only airline that's earned its cost of capital over the last half century. All the rest are losing money for their shareholders over time. They have good cycles and bad cycles. How did that happen? Well, it's just the other airlines had a step aside whenever Southwest came into a route. The other airlines just had to say,”
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 an insane, insane, insane brand. And, you know, it has a price premium for anything over any of its competitors by a long shot. It keeps growing. It actually for most years and the last decade it has had 80 or 90 percent of the entire category growth is Lego. And so they're playing to win, to be distinctive in the minds of consumers. But Vanguard has got $9 trillion of assets under management. Last time I checked, does it do anything distinctive? Not really the customer, but do they have the lowest cost position so they can charge the lowest AUMs? Absolutely. And so there's different kinds of ways, but you'd know. By the actions that customers take”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your competitor keeps on pricing there, you may think you have the low cost position, but they do. And you have to give them whatever share they desire at that lower price because you can't compete there. So you'll know you're playing to play if you're not aiming to and accomplishing having either an offer where Lenny walks into the store, whatever kind of store it is and says it says to the person in the store, I want that brand, right? This is an example, Lego, one of the companies I've worked with for a long time, great company. It turns out that if you do market research on kids, a store that purports to be a toy store But that doesn't have Lego or Not a toy store. They would define it as not a toy store. Mom, why are we here? I wanted to go to a toy store. And she said, but it says toys on here. And the kid said.”
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 would mean mainly signs given to you by customers. So if you say, we're the most innovative company in our industry and customers, and let's say the industry distributes through a given channel, and customers come into that channel and they look at the two products and say, I could flip a coin on this one, right? You are not effectively playing to win. Maybe you thought you were winning, but customers don't think you're better. Or if your competitor lowers their price compared to your price, and you say to yourself, My God, if we lowered our price, we would make no money.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Win there where you've chosen to play to meet your winning aspirations, what capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't that would enable you to win that way? And then what management systems, enabling management systems you have to put in place to make sure you build and maintain those must-have capabilities to win where you've chosen to play to meet your winning aspiration. And so I came to the conclusion, actually it was in 1995, the end of an eight-year journey, I came to the conclusion those were the five and you had to do them together. And that is the essence of producing a strategy that compels desired customer action.”
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 I came to the view that you have to have answers to five questions. You have to have an answer to the question of what's your winning aspiration? Like, what are you trying to accomplish? Because it'll help contextualize the kinds of choices you could make. Then there's a where to play on what playing field or if you're like military stuff battlefield, are you going to plop yourself down on? You're not going to play everywhere in every product at every vertical stage around the world. You're going to pick some place. And in that place, how can you be either... Better than competitors in terms of creating customer value or lower cost than those competitors”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was founded essentially to commercialize Mike Porter's work. Customers would ask us, they'd say, well, we like Mike Porter and we'd like to have one of those. We can look at ourselves under his framework and we can say we're stuck in the middle. And he said, that's bad. And he said, good is this or this. How do we think through creating one of those? We didn't actually have an answer. And it turned out because I was sort of the most I don't know, intellectually engaged on this and didn't mind the hard work of product development from about 1987 when we sort of discovered we really didn't know that. And clients really wanted us to tell them that. Between 1987 and 1995, I did all this work on, well, how could you develop a process for getting yourself one of those, right? One of those excellent strategies.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a theory of how strategy should, what result it should produce for you. Mike Porter then came along in 1980, so 63 Bruce Anderson and 80 Porter, the two most important figures in the history of strategy, came along and said strategy has to look like this. It has to have this as its output. But neither of them was very good on because again, it was early. They can't do everything right away of, well, how would you get one of those? So Mike Porter says you have to be either differentiated or low cost. Good. And if you look through competitive strategy, his landmark's seminal book to say, how would you do that? There is no answer. And because monitor company, the firm I was one of the leaders of for a decade and a half.”
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, and this is sort of the fruits of many, many years of doing strategy work and trying to figure out how do you do this thing? Because the fun thing was I was in the era, like I started in strategy in 1981, and that was early in the era. Strategy was born in 1963 with the founding of Boston Consulting Group by Bruce Henderson, who was the father of strategy, in my view, of practical commercial strategy. So it was still in the early days. Bruce Henderson”
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, like we would like them to take some of these out of their pocket and give them to us. Can we make them? No, we can. So essentially the job of strategy is to make decisions on the things we do control. That will compel we can't force, but it'll compel them. They'll say, gosh, I should take my hard-earned cash, and whether it's a company or an individual, I should take my hard-earned cash and give it to you rather than give it to nobody if there's no product now or give it to a competitive product. So the important pieces of it are integrated, right? It's the whole set of choices that has that one outcome. that it compels desired customer action.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compel desired customer action. So, the way I think about it is there's a whole bunch of things a company controls, right? How many factories to build? How much R&D to do in what areas and how much advertising to do, how many people to hire, what to pay them, blah, blah, blah. Those are all the things under our control. What, Lenny, is the thing we have almost no control over. If we're a company”
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'm not a fan of that piece of work. I would say it doesn't fit nicely into research-based view of the firm versus Mike Porter. It's sort of like, here's another lens to take on the world. And I'm going to take that lens. Everything's hypercompetitive. And here's how you think about hypercompetition.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think that he, like most business academics, he doesn't know much about business, right? Like he hasn't gone out and practiced a lot. He came to our school and gave a lecture because people loved hypercompetition because he would blast Mike Porter and he gave a example of Procter& GameL's been consulting at Procter& Gamble and know everything about Procter& Gamble basically and what he said about Procter& Gamble had zero to do with reality, like zero. It was just completely, utterly, absolutely wrong. And I sort of asked him afterwards. It's sort of like, why do you say that? And he said, well, I think that's the way it worked. Are you kidding me?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He also is of the, I'm jealous of my porter kind of thing, so I've got to say Mike Porter is wrong. And here's how I am so right. And competition doesn't take place in the way Mike says where it's really stable and whatever. It's really hyper competition. Mike Porter never in his entire life has said competition is stable. He's repeatedly said the opposite. But in order to say, I'm not like my porter. And in fact, distinguish myself by saying he's wrong and I'm right. And so I don't know. He seems like a... A fine guy”
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 he's wrote written a very, I think, useful book that would in some sense fit into my how to win box, right? I say strategies about where to how to win. And he has a what I call a categorical model. Here are categories of things that you should think about. If you're trying to win, here are seven ways of winning. And I categorize him as a non-academic practical strategy guy. Richard Rumalt is a now retired tuck professor and he has a kind of this hyper competition thing that he does.”
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, one of them is sort of an academic, and one of them is a quasi-academic or non-academic like me. I was a tenured professor for many years, but don't consider myself an academic. I don't think Hamilton does, though I've never asked. He's”
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 was not allowed. And if you try to get a job at any business, the only exception might be Harvard Business School, maybe. But if you took the 49 other top business schools in America and if asked the question, do you swear allegiance to the resource-based view of the firm if you don't answer an enthusiastic yes, you have no chance of being hired zero?”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Departments or areas, as we call it, like strategic management is an area. They have 100% control over what's taught in strategic management, finance in finance, et cetera. The dean may be the most powerful person in the school. And I happened to be a super successful dean. So if anything, I was a super powerful dean. And students would beg me, they'd say, you know, Roger, you have this 20 years of experience. You're sort of a famous consultant in strategy and you got these theories, please teach a course in it. I did do extracurricular stuff. I had practice of one Saturday a year teaching everything I knew to anybody who wanted to show up, but for credit.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People just roll their eyes at them, and so it doesn't get used. I've only seen it used in consulting companies for 42 years, and I've seen it used once And the truth, as is usually the case, is that it's both. And that's why the model I use for strategies says a lot about where you play is important. That's one of the key questions. And your capabilities are important and you've got to link those things together. For the most part in the leading business schools, it's illegal to teach 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
“We at the resource-based view of the firm think that strategy is all about building resources. And if you build resources, it's almost like if you build it, they will come. And that's what you should pay attention to. Now, the problem is any resource that may be useful somewhere is not necessarily useful elsewhere. So it sort of begs the question, how would you think through what resources to invest in building? What would be a way of doing that, of investing here versus here versus here? It's silent on that because it's kind of a dumb theory and it doesn't have anything useful to say in my view about that. And so when the students go out and say their company, I'm going to do a VR. Analysis or a VRIN”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Approaching it. It's a theory that's sort of taken over called the resource based view of the firm that was like in the world of academics there's a weird place where the number one emotion is jealousy and people were massively jealous of Mike Porter who sort of created many of the most important concepts of strategy when he wrote a book competitive strategy in 1980. And so they needed to sort of counter him because they just didn't like the fact that he was so prominent and they decided they would say he was about positioning. So they called his the positioning school that and they caricatured what he said, which he never did, but they said he said it's all about finding a place that is structurally attractive and then Milking it for everything you can.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Students are no longer trained on youthful strategy. And the other feeder into people learning strategy or the strategy consulting firms, but the strategy consulting firms, the so-called strategy consulting firms, do almost no strategy anymore because it's a little business compared to post-merger integration digital transformation and a bunch of other things. People aren't prepared educationally for it. And if they're not prepared educationally for it, then they sure don't get prepared for it in companies. It's intellectually challenging and it's emotionally intimidating.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making And it is often intimidating to say, oh dear, I have to cut these things off and not do them and actually make a decision that I'll be held accountable for potentially, or I'll even hold myself accountable for. So that's a second thing. It's harder sort of emotionally, not harder intellectually. And then there's sort of the training aspect of it, the knowledge aspect of it, which is what's taught now in strategy, in business schools generally sucks. It's gone on a crazy theoretical bent, the strategy academy as a whole has fallen in love with a theory called the resource-based theory of the firm that is silly and nobody uses it out in the world. And so”
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 have never met this mythical beast called a great natural strategist. Great strategists have all one thing in common. Just practice.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to have answers to five questions. What's your winning aspiration? To play, how can you win? What capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't? And then what enabling management systems do you have to put in place for the most part in the leading business schools? It's illegal to teach 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
“What's taught now in business schools generally sucks. People aren't prepared educationally, and they sure don't get prepared for it in companies. It's intellectually challenging and it's emotionally intimidating.”
2024-07-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source