Playing to Win in Platform Organizations: A Strategic Framework for the 21st Century

Traditional organizational models are breaking under modern market dynamics. As Roger Martin recently shared in our podcast, “companies have gotten so big that it really is a challenge to manage them with techniques that would have been used widely 20-25 years ago.”

Today’s organizations face what Martin colorfully describes as “mongol hordes” – thousands of VC-backed startups continuously attacking their markets. In this environment, the old way of organizing through bureaucratic hierarchies and functional silos cannot keep up.

Enter the Platform Organization, a model transforming traditional companies into adaptive, entrepreneurial ecosystems. Since early 2020, when it became clear that conventional organizational forms couldn’t cope with mounting market complexity and technological change, we’ve been exploring frameworks for applying this model at Boundaryless. Most importantly, it was clear that functional models couldn’t develop a portfolio of multiple value propositions or enable the internal and external collaboration frameworks to combine shared and peculiar products and services to meet emerging niche customer needs.

Companies like Haier exemplify the platform organization model we’ve codified in our Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organization (3EO) framework. This framework, developed in collaboration with Haier Model Research Institute, provides a superior organizational topology for today’s market. Our work has evolved through continuous research, experimentation, and learning from pioneering organizations, leading to a framework that helps companies transition from traditional hierarchies to entrepreneurial ecosystems.

 

 

Understanding the Platform Organization and 3EO

We’ve covered this organizational framework countless times on this blog, but it’s worth recalling the key elements. The Platform Organization model fundamentally reimagines how companies organize and operate. Instead of traditional hierarchies, it creates an ecosystem of autonomous entrepreneurial units coordinating through market mechanisms and easy-to-create contracts. The 3EO framework provides a clear topology for this new organizational form, based on Haier RenDanHeYi – the most advanced and most straightforward platform organization model. The critical elements of the organizational topology are:

• Micro-enterprises (MEs): Autonomous, entrepreneurial units with their own P&L responsibility, essentially Product Units
• Industry Platforms (IPs): Strategic entities that provide investment and incubation to MEs and ensure strategic alignment in specific market domains
• Shared Service Platforms (SSPs): Enabling infrastructures that provide common services and capabilities across the organization, especially consumed by every product unit (e.g., HR, Finance or Legal services, sometimes Sales and Marketing)
• Ecosystem Micro-Communities (EMCs): Dynamic contracts enabling collaboration between units to bring new products and services to market.
• Valuation Adjustment Mechanisms (VAMs): Investment agreements between Industry Platforms and Micro-enterprises that define goals, resources, and value-sharing arrangements while ensuring strategic alignment

 

Adapting the Framework to Your Context

It’s important to understand that 100% adherence to this topology isn’t the goal. Similar to frameworks like Team Topologies that create heuristics for teams and missions in software development, we aim to provide key archetypes for unit types and collaboration mechanisms. Each organization needs to adapt these patterns to its context.

Key considerations for adapting this framework:

• your organization’s size, structure, and context.
• Industry-specific regulations might influence unit collaboration and required centralized services (e.g. compliance requirements).
• The implementation should factor in existing organizational culture and ways of working.
• The technical maturity of your organization may affect how quickly you can adopt certain patterns.
• The nature of the products or the geographic distribution of teams and time zones may impact how these essential artifacts can be adopted inside your organization.

The framework should guide rather than dictate. It should provide a common language and mental model for discussing organizational design while remaining flexible for your unique circumstances. This is why, along with a particular approach to teams or unit topology, we developed a set of 4 key tenets and 11 principles in a manifesto that allows implementing the transition towards a Platform Organization from a first-principle perspective.

This structure enables organizations to foster entrepreneurship at every level, allowing a faster response to market changes. An “unbundled” and loosely coupled nature allows easy collaborations to create value through ecosystemic relationships inside and outside the organization. Furthermore, a Platform Organization can maintain coherence in market reach without embedding bureaucracy and stifling employee entrepreneurial energy in a market that requires diversity and agility.

 

 

The Playing to Win Framework: applying it in a Platform Organization

 

Roger Martin’s Playing to Win framework (image courtesy of Roger L. Martin) has long been recognized as one of the most effective and straightforward approaches to strategy. The framework articulates the basics of a sound business strategy and consists of five interconnected elements that form a cascade of strategic choices:

1. What is the winning aspiration?: Defines what winning means for your organization – not just participating in a market, but leading it. It must be externally focused on customers and competitors, providing direction and inspiration for the entire organization.
2. Where do you play?: Specifies the markets, customer segments, channels, and product categories for competition. This is about explicit choices on focus and engagement, defining the playing field for competitive advantage.
3. How do you win?: Understand your unique value proposition to create a competitive advantage in chosen markets, tightly connected to where you play, as different markets require different winning approaches.
4. What capabilities do you need?: Identifies the essential activities and competencies to deliver your where-to-play and how-to-win choices, working as a reinforcing system where you demonstrate clear superiority over competitors.
5. What management systems are required?: Determines the structures, measures, and processes to support and sustain your strategy, enabling the building of key capabilities while reinforcing desired behaviors and decisions.

While these elements are crucial, their implementation must evolve for today’s market. Let’s explore how the Platform Organization model provides superior mechanisms for implementing each element of the Playing to Win framework.

 

Winning Aspiration in Platform Organizations

Traditional organizations struggle to create winning aspirations relevant across diverse business units while providing meaningful guidance for front-line decisions. As Martin notes, “most strategies are actually not what a company writes down as their strategy. Most of that is just garbage crap, stuff that sounds good.”

The Platform Organization solves this through what Martin calls “nested” strategic choices. The organization sets an overarching aspiration that provides context for entrepreneurial units to develop aligned but specific ambitions. A key aspiration at Haier is to be industry-leading. Industry Platforms translate broad winning aspirations into specific, domain-related ones, while VAM contracts ensure micro-enterprises create ambitious goals that align with the wider vision.

 

Key Mechanisms:

• Industry Platforms translate corporate aspirations into domain-specific objectives.
• VAM Contracts allow aspirations to be set at the specific unit level.
• Micro-enterprises develop market-focused aspirations.
• When complex initiatives arise from multiple micro-enterprises and/or external partners, EMCs enable collaborative goal-setting.

 

Where to Play: From Prescription to Emergence

Traditionally, organizations struggle to balance corporate-level market choices with the need for local adaptation and opportunity sensing. Top-down prescriptions often lose relevance after a few weeks, making it difficult to respond to market changes. Teams become more attached to objectives negotiated with their leaders than to customer feedback and market signals.

Platform Organizations instead create what Martin calls “strategic choice chartering”: Industry Platforms define broad domains of interest where the organization is confident that it can leverage significant strategic assets. Micro-enterprises are empowered and accountable for identifying and pursuing specific opportunities within them and setting their own objectives. VAMs provide the framework for negotiating and agreeing on specific market opportunities within these domains.

 

Key Mechanisms:

• Industry Platforms define and invest in strategic market domains.
• Micro-enterprises identify and pursue market opportunities. They use VAMs to establish market focus and success metrics in negotiations with IPs.
• EMCs enable coordinated market approaches.

 

How to Win: From Control to Empowerment

Traditional organizations often prescribe detailed competitive strategies from the top, leading to what Martin calls “infantilizing managers” and creating rigidities.

Platform organizations let micro-enterprises craft their own operational strategies by balancing competition and collaboration. Units create strategies, use shared capabilities, and form alliances through EMCs with internal and external partners. In our experience, it’s essential to understand if competitive advantage needs to be sought in creating particular structures and hierarchies between micro-enterprises, avoiding creating too much fragmentation of value propositions when implementing the model. For instance, creating “parent” product areas to group lower-level P&Ls can be beneficial. Smaller micro-enterprises innovate while shared, often costly, tech capabilities are developed to support all user-facing units, preventing dual spending and inefficiencies.

 

Key Mechanisms:

• Industry Platforms guide competitive positioning in domains and invest in “enabling” differentiating capabilities to support multiple solution MEs.
• Micro-enterprises develop unique value propositions with VAMs, aligning incentives with strategic outcomes more swiftly.
• EMCs enable collaborative advantage.
• Shared Service Platforms provide scalable support across domains.
• Market-based coordination replaces bureaucratic control.

 

Core Capabilities: From Centralized to Distributed

Traditional organizations struggle to balance economies of scale in capabilities with local adaptation and innovation. They face a fundamental tension: the need to be efficient (achieve economies of scale), adaptive to local markets, and innovative. This creates specific problems. When organizations centralize capabilities (like IT, HR, or R&D) to achieve efficiency, they often create slow, bureaucratic processes that can’t respond quickly to local needs and One-size-fits-all solutions that don’t work for specific markets. When they distribute capabilities locally to be more responsive, they face duplicated costs, efforts, and inconsistent quality and standards.

Platform Organizations create what Martin calls “optimization” between shared and specialized capabilities. Shared Service Platforms provide common capabilities, while micro-enterprises develop unique competencies aligned with their strategies. Sometimes mixed-shape organizational units called “Node MEs” provide services and products that are not user-facing and needed by many user-facing Micro-Enterprises but not “commoditized”. The mix between:

• Shared Service Platforms for commoditized foundational capabilities
• Node Micro-Enterprises for internal B2B services (like R&D, Manufacturing…)
• User Facing Micro-Enterprises for market-ready products and services

Provides good depth and choice to operate capabilities, achieving economies of scale when needed and economies of scope for niche solutions.

 

Key Mechanisms:

• Shared Service Platforms provide foundational capabilities.
• Node Micro-enterprises consolidate B2B services to reduce User Facing Micro-enterprises’ need to integrate the entire value/supply chain.
• User-Facing Micro-enterprises, develop specialized capabilities
• EMCs enable capability sharing and combination to achieve market-leading outcomes, ensuring every unit has skin in the game in going the extra mile for success.

 

Management Systems: From Control to Enablement

Traditional management systems have largely evolved into bureaucratic barriers against innovation and market responsiveness. In our conversation, Roger Martin observed that this problem is perfectly exemplified by what he calls “the GE model” – where a massive 750-person strategy department at the corporate level would dictate the strategy and detailed plans to all businesses.

These traditional systems tell managers exactly what to do, instead of empowering them to make strategic choices. They create rigid reporting structures that slow down decisions and remove their ability to respond to market opportunities. By the time decisions move through the bureaucracy, the opportunity—or threat—has already transformed the competitive landscape.

Even modern management approaches aren’t immune to this problem. Martin is particularly critical of systems like OKRs, which he sees as being “substituted for strategy.” Companies mistakenly believe that declaring objectives makes them more likely to happen. When these aren’t met, they blame execution rather than recognizing their lack of real strategy.

Platform Organizations implement what Martin calls “precise” choices about centralization versus decentralization. Industry Platforms employ VAM contracts to invest in new and existing Micro-Enterprises, maintaining a high-level portfolio view, and ensure a coherent go-to-market. Micro-enterprises manage autonomously their day-to-day operations according to market dynamics and opportunities. EMC contracts allow MEs to collaborate on complex customer scenarios through a real market-based system with aligned incentives instead of top-down directions.

 

Key Mechanisms:

• Industry Platforms provide strategic guidance and investment aligned with a Portfolio view.
• VAMs replace traditional budgeting and create entrepreneurial incentives.
• EMCs enable dynamic coordination and collaboration between product units with aligned incentives.
• Shared Service Platforms provide basic infrastructure and services.
• Market-based coordination replaces the hierarchy.

Conclusion: The Future of Strategy Implementation in Platform Organizations

The Platform Organization model provides superior mechanisms for implementing Roger Martin’s Playing to Win framework in today’s market. It is exemplified by Haier and codified in the 3EO framework. Combining micro-enterprises, industry platforms, shared service platforms, EMCs, and VAMs enables organizations to maintain strategic coherence while fostering entrepreneurship, innovation, and rapid adaptation.

 

These frameworks don’t dictate all-or-nothing changes. Instead, they provide a set of first principles and polarities to navigate, as explained in our article Designing a Platform Organization: Navigating Key Architectural Decisions”.

As Martin emphasized in our conversation, the key is being:

“precise about what you attempt to centralize and centrally control. If the answer is a lot, chances are bad things are gonna happen to you. But if your answer is a little, but a few important things, and we’re gonna decentralize whole lot else, then I think you’ve got a chance for success.”

The Platform Organization model provides precision – a clear topology and heuristics for deciding what to centralize versus decentralize, enable entrepreneurship while maintaining coherence, and compete effectively in an increasingly complex market environment.