“The ‘Right to Win’ (RTW) is a company’s unique, sustainable ability to succeed in a specific market by leveraging superior capabilities, products, and a differentiated ‘way to play’ that outperform competitors, giving them a better-than-even chance of creating value and growth.” – Right to Win
A company’s right to win is the recognition that it is better prepared than its competitors to attract and keep the customers it cares about, grounded in a sustainable competitive advantage that extends beyond short-term market positioning.1 This concept represents more than simply having superior resources; it is the ability to engage in any competitive market with a better-than-even chance of success consistently over time.3 The right to win emerges when a company aligns three interlocking strategic elements: a differentiated way to play, a robust capabilities system, and product and service fit that work together coherently.1
The Three Pillars of Right to Win
The foundation of a right to win rests on understanding what your company can do better than anyone else. Rather than pursuing growth indiscriminately across multiple areas, successful organisations focus on identifying three to six differentiating capabilities-the interconnected people, knowledge, systems, tools and processes that create distinctive value to customers.1,5 These capabilities differ fundamentally from assets; whilst assets such as facilities, machinery, and supplier connections can be replicated by competitors, capabilities cannot.1 The critical question becomes: “What do we do well to deliver value?”1
A well-developed way to play represents a chosen position in a market, grounded in understanding your capabilities and where the market is heading.1 This positioning must fulfil four essential criteria: there must be a market that values your approach; it must be differentiated from competitors’ ways to play; it must remain relevant given expected industry changes; and it must be supported by your capabilities system, making it feasible.1 Finally, the product and service fit ensures that offerings are directly aligned with the capabilities system, delivering superior returns to shareholders.1
Coherence acts as the binding agent across these three elements.1 Achieving alignment with one or even two elements proves insufficient; only when all three synchronise with one another and with the right market conditions can a company truly claim a sustainable right to win.1
Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage
The right to win is not inherited; it is earned through strategic alignment and disciplined execution.2 This requires an in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape, customer expectations, and team capabilities.2 A strategy that leverages unique assets or insights creates a competitive moat, making it challenging for competitors to catch up, though execution remains where many organisations falter.2
Innovation and adaptability prove essential to sustaining this advantage.2 Organisations that continuously evolve, anticipate market shifts, and adapt their goods and services accordingly are more likely to maintain their competitive edge.2 This does not mean chasing every new trend but rather maintaining a keen sense of which innovations align with core competencies and long-term vision.2 Building a culture of excellence-attracting and nurturing top talent, fostering continuous improvement, and encouraging innovation-represents an often-overlooked yet significant asset in securing the right to win.2
Strategic Applications and Growth Pathways
Right-to-win strategies fall into four categories: customer-driven, capability-driven, value-chain-based, and those building on disruptive business models or technologies.4 The most utilised approach involves fulfilling unmet needs for existing customers that the core business does not currently address.4 However, the strategy delivering the biggest revenue gains involves leveraging core business capabilities-such as patents, technological know-how, or brand equity-to expand into adjacent and breakout businesses.4 Companies successfully utilising two or more right-to-win strategies to move into adjacent markets delivered 12 percentage points higher excess total shareholder return versus their subindustry peers.4
Assessing Your Right to Win
Organisations can evaluate their right to win through systematic analysis. This involves identifying the two most relevant competitors, determining three to six differentiating capabilities required for success, listing key assets and table-stakes activities, and rating performance across these dimensions.5 Differentiating capabilities should be specific and interconnected rather than merely listing functions or organisational units.5 For example, one of Apple’s differentiating capabilities is “innovation around customer interfaces to create better communications and entertainment experiences.”5 Assets, whilst less sustainable than capabilities, represent criteria important to the market and warrant inclusion in competitive assessment.5
Related Theorist: C.K. Prahalad and the Core Competence Framework
The concept of right to win draws significantly from the work of C.K. Prahalad (1941-2010), an influential Indian-American business theorist and consultant who fundamentally shaped modern strategic thinking through his development of the core competence framework. Prahalad’s seminal 1990 Harvard Business Review article, co-authored with Gary Hamel, “The Core Competence of the Corporation,” introduced the revolutionary idea that organisations should identify and leverage their unique, hard-to-imitate capabilities rather than pursuing diversification across unrelated business areas.1
Born in Bangalore, India, Prahalad earned his undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics before pursuing business education. He spent much of his career at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where he conducted extensive research on strategic management and organisational capability. His work challenged the prevailing strategic orthodoxy of the 1980s, which emphasised portfolio management and strategic business units. Instead, Prahalad argued that companies should view themselves as portfolios of core competencies-the collective learning and coordination of diverse production skills and technologies-rather than collections of discrete business units.
Prahalad’s framework directly underpins the right to win concept. He demonstrated that sustainable competitive advantage emerges not from owning assets but from developing distinctive capabilities that competitors cannot easily replicate. His research showed that companies like Sony, Honda, and 3M succeeded not because they possessed superior resources but because they had cultivated unique organisational capabilities in areas such as miniaturisation, engine design, or innovation processes. These capabilities enabled them to enter adjacent markets and create new products that competitors struggled to match.
Beyond core competence theory, Prahalad later developed the concept of the “bottom of the pyramid,” exploring how companies could create right-to-win strategies by serving low-income consumers in emerging markets through innovation and capability leverage. His work emphasised that strategic advantage comes from understanding what your organisation does distinctively well and then systematically building, protecting, and extending those capabilities across markets and customer segments.
Prahalad’s intellectual legacy remains central to contemporary strategic management. His insistence that capabilities-not assets-form the foundation of competitive advantage directly informs how modern organisations approach the right to win. His framework provides the theoretical scaffolding that explains why companies with seemingly fewer resources can outperform better-capitalised competitors: they possess superior, integrated capabilities that create distinctive value. This insight transformed strategic planning from a financial exercise into a capabilities-centred discipline, making Prahalad’s work indispensable to understanding the right to win in contemporary business strategy.
References
1. https://www.pwc.com/mt/en/publications/other/does-your-strategy-give-you-the-right-to-win.html
2. https://multifamilycollective.com/2024/02/strategy-how-do-we-define-our-right-to-win/
3. https://intrico.io/interview-best-practices/right-to-win
