Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B006KZ8H0Y | Format: EPUB
Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy Description
A Distillation of The Most Important Business Thinking of Our Time
Michael Porter's groundbreaking ideas on competition and strategy have unfolded over three decades and are spread across a dauntingly long list of publications. Every manager can name individual pieces of his work - competitive advantage, the value chain, five forces - but no one, not even Porter himself, has put the entire puzzle together to reveal it as an integrated whole. This lucid, concise audiobook does just that. Written with Porter's full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this book provides an engaging summary of Porter's ideas and an invaluable synthesis of this important body of work, making clear how each of Porter's powerful concepts relates to the others and, most important, to the practical realities managers face.
Modern thinking about competition and strategy begins with Porter's frameworks. They are the most widely used in practice by managers around the world. But as Magretta points out, Porter is often misunderstood and his frameworks misapplied. Magretta's own wide-ranging business experience allows her to identify the most common of these misconceptions - among them, the deeply held but dangerous belief that competition is about being the best. Understand Porter and you will see why competing to be the best sparks an inevitable race to the bottom.
Understanding Michael Porter will enable all leaders throughout any organization to grasp Porter's seminal ideas about competition and strategy and deploy them to achieve competitive success.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 6 hours and 7 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Gildan Media, LLC
- Audible.com Release Date: December 12, 2011
- Language: English
- ASIN: B006KZ8H0Y
Michael Porter's ideas on strategic management are important. However his books Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors and Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance are very dense (in addition to being 30 years old). This much shorter book is written in a journalistic style and conveys Porter's basic ideas relating to business-unit strategy.
The book serves as a first encounter with Porter's thinking, but I would really urge readers to study Porter's two first books as well. Even though Porter's books are 30+ years old, they are important. Classics have the remarkable feature of being relevant whenever they are read. Naturally, they are not perfect. They do not talk enough about service industries, but that was not really America in the 70s. The current book has the same deficiency; not that much about service industries.
Even if you have good familiarity with Porter I still cautiously recommend the book. It sometimes adds contextual information, small updates on Porter's thinking, and useful metaphors. For those of you who already have a fair amount of experience (important!) I would also recommend Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters.
The book is a summary of Porter's ideas from a journalist, so do not expect any deep, fundamental analysis.
Michael Porter is the Harvard Business School's guru of strategy. He became a leading strategy guru by asking big questions, like 'Why are some companies more profitable than others?,' as well as the same question about industries and some countries. However, the usefulness of his ideas has been limited by the fact that they have not been summarized and sequenced into a single source. Author Joan Magretta brings not only her own credible credentials to this summary of Porter's strategy work, but has also had him review each chapter with her.
The key to competitive success, per Porter, lies in an organization's ability to create unique value. Competing to be unique is accomplished against a specific, relevant set of rivals (the industry). The company's relative position within its industry determines how its value will be created and what kind of value that will be.
A good competitive strategy will result in sustainably superior performance. 'Being #1 or #2 in and industry' (Welch, at G.E.), 'making key acquisitions,' 'doubling the number served (for a non-profit), and 'Don't be evil' (Google) do not tell how an organization will outperform the competition. Nor do they tell one where to compete.
With everyone chasing the same customer (the result when everyone's strategy is simply 'to be the best') every sale is contested, and price competition is the ultimate outcome. As for being #1 or #2, in many industries scale economies are exhausted at a relatively small market share. (G.M. was the world's largest auto manufacturer, and went bankrupt; BMW, much smaller, has earned superior returns vs. the industry.) Overpriced M&A, over-extension into all market segments, and price-cutting to gain market share can be disastrous.
Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy Preview
Link
Please Wait...