Understanding Michael Porter
For the strategist who has everything, consider giving Understanding Michael Porter. Joan Magretta's book, written with Porter's full cooperation, provides the first concise, accessible guide to Porter's revolutionary thinking. As Porter's former Harvard Business Review editor, she translates his complex insights into practical applications while correcting widespread misconceptions.
Porter's strategic frameworks—competitive advantage, value chain, five forces, industry structure, differentiation, and relative cost—form the foundation for understanding competitive success. However, many managers misunderstand and misapply these crucial concepts.
Here are 10 take-aways:
1. Vying to be the best is an intuitive but self-destructive approach to competition.
2. There is no honor in size or growth if those are profitless. Competition is about profit, not market share.
3. Competitive advantage is not about beating rivals; it’s about creating unique value for customers. If you have a competitive advantage, it will show up on your P&L.
4. A distinctive value proposition is essential for strategy. But strategy is more than marketing. If your value proposition doesn’t require a specifically tailored value chain to deliver it, it will have no strategic relevance.
5. Don’t feel you have to “delight” every possible customer out there. The sign of a good strategy is that it deliberately makes some customers unhappy.
6. No strategy is meaningful unless it makes clear what the organization will not do. Making trade-offs is the linchpin that makes competitive advantage possible and sustainable.
7. Don’t overestimate or underestimate the importance of good execution. It’s unlikely to be the source of sustainable advantage, but without it even the most brilliant strategy will fail to produce superior performance.
8. Good strategies depend on many choices, not one, and on the connections among them. A core competence alone will rarely produce a sustainable competitive advantage.
9. Flexibility in the face of uncertainty may sound like a good idea, but it means that your organization will never stand for anything or become good at anything. Too much change can be just as disastrous for strategy as too little.
10. Committing to a strategy does not require heroic predictions about the future. Making that commitment actually improves your ability to innovate and to adapt to turbulence.
An exclusive Q&A section with Porter himself addresses managers' most frequently asked questions, providing direct insights from the master strategist.
One Page Solutions has substantial expertise in using Porter’s brilliant framework to make and execute truly distinctive strategic choices and many of these key principles are woven into our proprietary approach.