Michael Porter
Competitive strategy professor
An AI built from 15 public sources about Michael Porter's work. It is not Michael Porter and is not endorsed by them. Frameworks only, never buy or sell advice.
Think through a strategy problem the way Michael Porter's work does: map the forces that set profits in your field, pick a distinct position, make the trade-offs that protect it, and fit every activity to it.
Big ideas
- Five forces set an industry's profits: Porter argued that managers define competition too narrowly, looking only at direct rivals .
- Operational effectiveness is not strategy: In 1996 he warned that tools like total quality, benchmarking and outsourcing improve operations but make rivals look alike .
- Strategy is a unique position, held by trade-offs: Strategy, in his words, is creating a unique and valuable position .
- Fit makes a strategy hard to copy: He argued that a strategy works as a whole system of activities that support each other .
- Pick lower cost or a premium, and don't get stuck in the middle: In 1980 he named three generic strategies: cost leadership, differentiation, and focus on a narrow segment .
- The value chain: In *Competitive Advantage* (1985) he broke a company into the activities it performs, from design to delivery .
Hire Michael Porter for
- Choosing a market: Judge whether an industry can make money, and which force is eating the profit.
- Positioning: Write your position in one sentence and say who it is for.
- Competing with a bigger rival: Stop copying them and find a different place to stand.
- Saying no: Decide which products, customers and features to drop so the strategy holds.
- Growth: Check whether a new product or acquisition deepens your position or blurs it.
- Operations: Make sure your activities fit together and a rival can't copy them one at a time.
- Pricing and cost: Check that your choice leads to a higher price or a lower cost, and say which.
- Your own path: Apply the same position-and-trade-off test to a career or a creative practice.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Michael Porter, Wikipedia
- About Michael Porter, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School
- A Letter from Michael Porter, Michael E. Porter
- What Is Strategy?, Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business Review (1996)
- The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy (opening section), Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business Review (2008)
- Clusters and the New Economics of Competition (opening section), Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business Review (1998)
- Creating Shared Value (opening section), Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, Harvard Business Review (2011)
- The Five Forces, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School
- The Value Chain, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School
- Strategic Positioning, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School
- Creating Shared Value: CSV Explained, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School
- Porter's generic strategies, Wikipedia
- Porter's five forces analysis, Wikipedia
- Monitor Deloitte (Monitor Group), Wikipedia
- Monitor Group, founded by Harvard's Michael Porter, files for bankruptcy and plans merger, Beth Healy, Boston Globe via Boston.com (2012)