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Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors [Hardcover]

Michael E. Porter (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews) |
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Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0684841487 | ISBN-13: 978-0684841489 | Edition: 1
Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into nineteen languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity -- like all great breakthroughs -- Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies -- lowest cost, differentiation, and focus -- which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment.

More than a million managers in both large and small companies, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world have internalized Porter's ideas and applied them to assess industries, understand competitors,, and choose competitive positions. The ideas in the book address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of the ways companies go about competing.

Competitive Strategy has filled a void in management thinking. It provides an enduring foundation and grounding point on which all subsequent work can be built. By bringing a disciplined structure to the question of how firms achieve superior profitability, Porter's rich frameworks and deep insights comprise a sophisticated view of competition unsurpassed in the last quarter-century.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Fortune Three overarching game plans that work in one industry after another explain how thousands of real-world competitors come out on top.

The New York Times American executives are grasping for a logic to global competition. Mr. Porter...has given them one.

Choice Few books warrant the too-common publisher's blurb "landmark." This one does. Highest recommendation.

Strategic Management Journal Represents a quantum leap...may well be one of the most important contributions to the discipline of strategic management.

Journal of Business Strategy Any manager who studies and uses the materials in this book should be able to devise more successful strategies.

Philip Kotler S.C. Johnson & Son, Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Northwestern University Porter's books on competitive strategy are the seminal works in the field.

About the Author

Michael E. Porter, one of the world's leading authorities on competitive strategy and international competitiveness, is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. In 1983, Professor Porter was appointed to President Reagan's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the initiative that triggered the competitiveness debate in America. He serves as an advisor to heads of state, governors, mayors, and CEOs throughout the world. The recipient of the Wells Prize in Economics, the Adam Smith Award, three McKinsey Awards, and honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics and six other universities, Porter is the author of fourteen books, among them Competitive Strategy, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, and Cases in Competitive Strategy, all published by The Free Press. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 397 pages
  • Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (June 1, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0684841487
  • ISBN-13: 978-0684841489
  • Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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› Visit Amazon's Michael E. Porter Page
Michael E. Porter
Michael E. Porter, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, is the author of Competitive Strategy, the recipient of the 1979 McKinsey Foundation Award for The Best Harvard Business Review Article, and a guest columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Professor Porter developed the much praised MBA course on Industry and Competitive Analysis, lectures widely on competitive strategy, and is a strategic consultant to numerous companies in the United States and abroad.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
293 of 303 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Michael E. Porter is a professor at Harvard Business School and a leading authority on Strategy and Competitiveness. He did his MBA and Ph.D from Harvard. He has served as an advisor to several business and government organizations. He was also a founder of the strategy and management consulting firm, Monitor Group.
Professor Porter is best known for his landmark books that defined the field of Strategy - Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (1980) and Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (1985). These books are must reads at the leading business schools.
I read Competitive Strategy (1980) for a Strategy course. It starts with a bang. On the very second page of the first chapter you will find the figure for the famous Five Forces Driving Industry Competition. While Porter did not intend this framework to be used for case interviews, in reality, this is a very important framework to know for the case interviews conducted by leading strategy and management consultancy firms. All top MBAs and anybody who has ever been hired by the best strategy and management consultancy firms knows this framework, and has probably read this book. The first chapter immediately proceeds to explaining each of the five forces:
1. Threat of new entrants
2. Intensity of rivalry among existing competitors
3. Pressure from substitute products
4. Bargaining power of buyers
5. Bargaining power of suppliers
While the first chapter alone is worth the cost of this book, I recommend it for the wisdom contained in the rest of the book. The chapters are organized under three parts (General Analytical Techniques, Generic Industry Environments, and Strategic Decisions). There are several thought provoking discussions on concepts such as A Framework for Competitor Analysis (Future goals, Assumptions, Current strategy, Capabilities), Market Signals and a Strategic Analysis of Vertical Integration.
This book is the single most important book on business strategy. It is a classic - like the management classics of Peter Drucker. As with every classic, the examples are old (not to be confused with outdated). But, the competition HP faced for electronic calculators in the 70s, it still faces for computers today. There have been several changes in the players, technology, industries, globalization, etc, but the foundation built by Porter's masterpieces are still relevant today.
Porter's second book Competitive Advantage (1985) introduced another important tool - The Value Chain. This analyzes primary activities (Inbound logistics, Operations, Outbound logistics, Marketing and Sales, Services) and support activities (Procurement, Technology development, Human resource management, Firm infrastructure) that firms must analyze to create value and competitive advantage.
If my review was helpful to you, I request you to select "Yes" so that the rating is improved and more readers will get to read it.
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106 of 110 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Michael Porter is a Harvard Business School professor and a leading authority on competition and strategy. This book is a landmark in the field of strategy/strategic management, which later has become known as the positioning school. The book provides a great framework.

The book consists of three parts - General Analytical Techniques, Generic Industry Environments, and Strategic Decisions. In addition, the two appendices - Portfolio Techniques in Competitor Analysis, and How to Conduct an Industry Analysis - should also be mentioned as they are very useful.

In Part I, Porter discussess the structural analysis of industries (with the world-famous five forces), the three generic competitive strategies (overall cost leadership, focus, and differentiation), an excellent framework for competitor analysis, competitive moves, strategy toward buyers and suppliers, structural analysis within industries (strategic groups, strategic mapping, mobility barriers), and industry evolution (life cycle, evolutionary processes).

In Part II, Porter discusses competitive strategy within various generic industry environments, such as fragmented industries (with no real market leader), emerging industries (e-commerce and Internet are excellent examples, although not mentioned in this book as it was written in 1980), mature industries, declining industries, and global industries.

In Part III, Porter discusses strategic decisions which businesses/firms can take, such as vertical integration (forward, backward, partnerships), capacity expansion, and entry into new industries/businesses.

Even after 20 years, most of this book still stands strong, although some people will argue this. Michael Porter has responded to his critics in the 1996-Harvard Business Review article 'What is Strategy?' which is available as e-book (pdf-file) at Amazon.com. It is still a MUST for MBA-students and all other people interested in strategy/strategic management. The book is simple to read with plenty of examples and thus does not become a struggle.
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113 of 123 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Anyone would agree that this book is the best overview of competitive strategy analysis ever written. The strength of the book is a solid outline of subjects and questions to improve your thinking, and get to be a step ahead of the competition. In highly-competitive, commodity businesses, that's usually what strategies focus on.

On the other hand, the rapid advances of knowledge and technology mean that the relevant benchmark is perfection, not the competitor, in defining an ideal best practice. In that world, this book has serious limitations, because the competitive dimension is often less important than the customer and user dimension these days.

Any business arena begins, as Peter Drucker so aptly put it, with the task "to create a customer." That reminder is especially relevant today when they are so many new ways to serve a customer's needs that no one has ever considered before. The strategic point of 'Blown to Bits' for example is that almost every business will see its vertical value chain (moving from resources through to the customer) broken apart into tiny segments each served by specialists. If you did not begin with that perspective in analyzing the impact of electronically-based business practices, you could easily focus on the wrong tasks using this book to create an over-broad strategy focus, rather than concentrating on just a few areas.

I suspect that the applications of Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law need to be explicitly considered as part of the analysis that Professor Porter is recommending.

A more general weakness in this book is that it assumes that future conditions will be stable enough to draw conclusions about which conditions will be favorable, without giving enough guidance on how to deal with the increasing frequencies and degrees of volatility that we see (in areas like financial markets, commodity prices, the weather, changing customer preferences, and so forth).

Although no book that takes such a narrow focus can help but have weaknesses (like having the podiatrist not notice that you have kidney problems), if you want a good start of how to think about competitors, this is the book for you. Just be sure you keep developing yours strategy with additional dimensions after you finish using this analysis.

If you have read none of Professor Porter's works, this is the one book you should read.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
presenting the obvious
The book just organizes and presents what is obvious to any intelligent person. It does not give you any new perspective or anything you could not think about your self. Read more
Published 22 days ago by Jack London
Not for the Pragmatic
Full disclosure: This is a book I didn't finish. Let me explain why.

As someone who works for a small business and likes to see results fast - a pragmatic person, I'm... Read more
Published 28 days ago by PO
A Must Read for Business Students
Definitely a must read for business students and maybe marketing managers. Although I wouldn't call it the "bible" of the business world because as you'll notice, some of the... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Jonathan Quinteros
Competitive Strategy
Excellent book and an easy read. Thanks to amazon.com for making it so easy for me to buy books, CDs and DVDs. I feel sorry for brick and morter resalers.
Published 6 months ago by bob
A comprehensive way to understand your competition
Every firm competing in an industry has a competitive strategy, whether explicit or implicit, according to Michael Porter in this book. Read more
Published 9 months ago by John Gibbs
Classic Work, Basis of Understanding Business
Many well written reviews have covered the content of this book. It was required reading for several MBA programs in the 1980's and remains relevant. Read more
Published 11 months ago by The Curious Miss Bibliophilly
A must read despite being 30 years old.
This book is written in 1980, which was 30 years ago. Not 1998 as stated on amazon. Still it is as valid as ever. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Jackal
The Classic
This book is the classic tome on competitive business strategy. It's the first systemic treatment of the application of principles of microeconomics to business practice. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Charles Broming
Most important book not in MBA curriculum
I got this book as part of a recommended reading list from my last professor. After reading Competitive Strategy and looking back, this is a book I would have used as a resource... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Jay
Seminal Work
Competitive Strategy is one of the seminal works on strategic planning. Written thirty years ago, Michael Porter's insights hold true today and form the basis for almost all the... Read more
Published on May 12, 2010 by Michael Makarius
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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First Sentence:
The essence of formulating competitive strategy is relating a company to its environment. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
generic competitive strategies, sophisticated competitor analysis, demand leading stage, strategy toward buyers, intrinsic bargaining power, making competitive moves, structural entry barriers, tapered integration, framework for competitor analysis, strategic group map, new strategic group, capacity expansion process, other strategic groups, entry deterring price, mobility barriers, initiating firm, buyer selection, formulating competitive strategy, aerosol packaging, different strategic groups, many national markets, other potential entrants, industry maturity, communicating commitment, exit barriers
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, The Structural Analysis of Industries, Structural Analysis Within Industries, The Strategic Analysis of Vertical Integration, The Transition, Business Week, Texas Instruments, Entry Into New Businesses, Market Signals, Del Monte, Digital Equipment, Maxwell House, South Korea, Data General, Firms of Top, New York, Ethan Allen
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