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CCCA_V7No2_Q&ARoger Martin-FIN_CCCA 13-05-21 12:32 PM Page 31 Feature — Conférence Nationale du Printemps CCCA Magazine caught up with Roger Martin, outgoing dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and keynote speaker at the CCCA Spring Conference, to discuss why it’s important for both law departments and law firms to decide on a strategy and how to make it succeed. He spoke with senior editor Yves Faguy. Business strategy: Playing to win CCCAWhy is strategy so important? Roger Martin If you don’t have a strategy, any choice or any decision anybody in the organization makes can be justified. And that’s why you get this great diffusion of activities in companies where everybody’s kind of doing their thing and at the end, it doesn’t add up to what you hoped it would.The only antidote to that is having strat- egy, which means making a few key choices that help guide everybody else’s activi- ties. Everybody will have to make choices on their own. That’s the nature of the organizations, but they need to be guided by answers to five questions. CCCA What are those questions? RM The five questions of strategy are: what’s our winning aspiration, where are we going to play, how are we going to win, what are the capabilities required, and what are the management systems. CCCA So what is easy and what is hard for a company, a law firm, a legal department to do when following through on strategy? RMWell,it’s hard right now because there are so many definitions of strategy and peo- ple think it’s a big long plan and they have to do enormous amounts of analysis.That’s ÉTÉ 2013 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association 31