The Five Plays of ‘Where to Play’

The stock market loves a short story. This year, the S&P’s gains have been driven by a handful of familiar companies: Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have all been riding the AI wave. Investors and analysts have watched their share prices climb and told themselves a simple narrative: get behind the right trend, and growth will follow.

In the short term, that’s certainly true. But if you only look at who’s winning today, you miss the broader lesson. 

The companies that are leading aren’t just riding the hottest cycle. They’ve created new cycles of their own. Nvidia expanded beyond gaming into AI infrastructure. Microsoft bet big on cloud services. And Meta redefined itself around platforms. The same pattern shows up in companies far outside Silicon Valley: future-focused leaders choose their arenas early, while everyone else is still optimizing the old game. They make bold choices about which arenas to enter, which games to stop playing, and how to ensure that each move makes the whole enterprise stronger.

Avoid the Common ‘Where to Play’ Traps

Too often, leaders obsess over how to win: cost structure, competitive advantage, execution. They spend less time thinking about where to play: assessing whether they’re competing in the right arena to begin with. That’s often more important. After all, there’s no point in spending a fortune fixing up an old house if it sits in a lousy neighborhood. 

Conversely, when present-focused leaders try to expand beyond their current arenas, they often make the same mistakes. It’s simply too easy to fall into some common “Where to Play” traps:

1. Confusing adjacency with opportunity: moving one inch to the right on the map is easy, but it’s rarely transformative.
2. Relying on historical data: past success can feel safe, but the real “Where to Play” question is about tomorrow’s growth, not yesterday’s performance.
3. Focusing on one big idea: betting the farm on a single space can focus a team, but you need to explore a portfolio of spaces to optimize risk and upside.
4. Chasing random innovations: cool ideas are fun, but moving into a space that’s disconnected from your own business reduces the chance of synergy or advantage.

Companies fall into these traps because traditional strategy methods tend to over-index on quantifying opportunity spaces, while corporate innovation initiatives chase bright, shiny objects. Future-focused leaders recognize that, to thread the needle, they need the courage to avoid these traps and make the leap into a future others can’t yet see.

So, what does it take to make a transformative “Where to Play” move? Looking at some of the companies that did it best, you see five distinct plays. Each of them shows how leaders can spot hidden strengths, anticipate decline, reframe who they are, step into white space, and build reinforcing ecosystems. Together, they form a playbook for any leader facing one of the most important decisions in strategy.

1. The Hidden Strength

The best place to start is with what makes you great. It’s not about guessing where the market might go—it’s about recognizing what you already do uniquely well and asking how it could serve a bigger field.

In the early 2000s, Amazon was still just an online retailer, albeit one with audacious ambitions. Growth was exploding. But, as the business grew, each team ended up rebuilding the same infrastructure, from data centers to databases. Over time, what had made Amazon fast was now slowing it down.

Seeing the duplication and loss in productivity, Amazon decided to build shared internal services so developers could access computing power and storage on demand. That’s when Jeff Bezos and his team had a realization: if Amazon was struggling with this, so was every other e-commerce company. And as new startups came on line, many of them might want to rent that infrastructure rather than build it from scratch. While Amazon might not have been known as an infrastructure provider, it was quietly becoming one of the best in the world. 

That insight gave birth to Amazon Web Services, one of the most consequential “Where to Play” expansions in modern history. What started as a toolkit for internal developers became a product for the rest of the world. AWS has grown to be the most profitable part of Amazon’s empire, generating $124 billion in annual recurring revenue. AWS didn’t spring from a brainstorming session. It came from recognizing and commercializing a hidden strength.

The lesson for leaders: leverage what you already do well. Sometimes the boldest move is to step into a field that looks unrelated, but where your capabilities allow you to change the game. Buried in your operations may be the raw material for a new business—and maybe even a new industry.

2. The Renewal Bet

The boldest moves often come when leaders face the reality of their own decline. If your core business is peaking, the hardest but smartest step may be to bet the company on the next arena before the current one deteriorates.

One of the best examples of this came in the form of an AWS competitor. By the late 2000s, Microsoft was in danger of becoming irrelevant. Its historical cash cows, Windows and Office, were plateauing. PC sales were flattening. Google was offering free cloud-based productivity tools. 

Of course, some experts argued that the decline was cyclical, and sales would eventually rebound. The consensus on Wall Street was that Microsoft should try to maximize margins on its existing franchises. But CEO Satya Nadella and his team saw what others didn’t: the decline of packaged software wasn’t cyclical, it was structural. The future of computing would live in subscription-based services delivered over the cloud.

Moving to the cloud would, in turn, give Microsoft the ability to sell infrastructure services to clients. And that would put it in direct competition with AWS, who had taken an early lead in the space. Without an alternative, Microsoft decided to move forward. 

The bet paid off. Today, Azure is the beating heart of Microsoft’s business, accounting for the largest share of revenue and the fastest growth. The company that once lived and died on Windows now thrives on the cloud.

The lesson for leaders: anticipate long-term decline and commit to the next arena. If your core business is peaking, it’s time to find new places to play. Pretending the decline isn’t happening won’t save you. Anticipating it just might.

3. The Identity Shift

Sometimes, the real breakthrough comes from reframing who you are. When you shift from what you make to why you matter, whole new possibilities open up.

For more than a century, Northwestern Mutual has been known as a life insurance company. Its field agents sold policies designed to protect families from the worst-case scenario. But by the early 2000s, life insurance participation was falling. Demographics had shifted, younger consumers weren’t buying, and persistently low interest rates eroded returns.

Faced with stagnation, Northwestern Mutual made a crucial reframe. It stopped thinking of itself as a seller of insurance products and started seeing itself as a steward of financial wellness. That shift opened the door to wealth management, retirement planning, and investment advisory.

The move wasn’t just a diversification. It changed the very identity of the company. Agents who once sold policies became financial advisors with a broader mandate. Customers who came for protection stayed for guidance. Today, wealth management is one of Northwestern Mutual’s fastest-growing businesses.

The lesson for leaders: Reframe what business you’re in. Ask what purpose you serve beyond the products you sell. The answer may free you to enter spaces you never considered.

4. The Bigger Need

Every so often, a company gets the chance to vault into a bigger space. See a bigger need, bold leaders bring together businesses that aren’t connected but ought to be.

CVS built its business as a retail pharmacy chain. For decades, it was a middleman for prescriptions, driving traffic with convenience and supplementing margins with retail goods. By the early 2000s, the economics of that model were deteriorating. Generic drugs compressed profits, and online competition weakened the stores. 

CVS realized that prescriptions are a solution to a larger need: staying healthy. In 2006, CVS acquired MinuteClinic to offer healthcare in its stores. A year later, it merged with Caremark to manage prescription benefits. And in 2018, CVS acquired Aetna, one of the largest health insurers in America. With a series of bold moves, CVS vaulted beyond pharmacy retail into the broader healthcare ecosystem. 

The lesson for leaders: examine whether your business serves a larger set of needs that your customers have. Then build an ecosystem that enables you to meet those needs.

5. The Flywheel

Of course, new “Where to Play” answers shouldn’t distract the company. The most powerful plays are the ones that reinforce each other. Like CVS, the true magic happens when each successive move strengthens the last one. Over time, you create a system that compounds into something competitors can’t touch.

In the 1950s, Disney was an animation studio. Its films were beloved, but its revenue was volatile. Walt Disney’s idea for a theme park seemed eccentric at best, reckless at worst. What did movies have to do with Ferris wheels and castles?

But Walt Disney understood something his critics didn’t. A park wasn’t just another business line. It was a place where people could live inside the stories they already loved. That realization drove him to build a system. The so-called synergy map that Disney created is a masterclass in strategy. Created in 1957, it outlines how every Disney property plays a part in a complex web of relationships. Films drive park attendance, parks fuel merchandise, merchandise reinforces character recognition, and television keeps the stories alive.

The lesson for leaders: ensure your moves reinforce the others into a self-sustaining system. The best “Where to Play” moves aren’t standalones. They create a system of reinforcing choices that compound into an advantage no rival can easily copy.

The Throughline is Courage

There are easy paths that lead to slow decline. The harder path—the future-defining path—is to ask different questions. What hidden strengths could we unlock? What future decline do we need to face now? How do we reframe our identity, step into white space, and build a system that reinforces itself?

Without a doubt, it takes courage to look past the comfort of today’s success. Not every bet will pay off. Facing uncertainty, most leaders decide that they’d rather keep their heads down, optimizing yesterday’s business. A rare few choose to make the leap. When we look back in a few years, many of their choices will look obvious, if not inevitable. But in the moment, they feel terrifying. That’s the nature of expanding where you play. It isn’t just a strategic decision. It’s an act of imagination—and a test of nerve. The leaders who embrace it won’t just adapt to the future. They’ll help create it.