Michael Porter
27 quotes
Biography
Michael Eugene Porter is an American businessman and professor at Harvard Business School. He was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group and FSG, a social impact consultancy.
"If people in the organization don't understand how a company is supposed to be different, how it creates value compared to its rivals, then how can they possibly make all of the myriad choices they have to make? Every salesman has to know the strategy — otherwise, he won't know who to call on. Every engineer has to understand it, or she won't know what to build."
"The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy."
"The essence of formulating strategy is relating a company to its environment."
"Low cost relative to competitors becomes the theme running through the entire strategy, though quality, service and other areas cannot be ignored."
"The firm achieving focus may also potentially earn above-average returns for its industry. Its focus means that the firm either has a low cost position with its strategic target, high differentiation, or both."
"The grandfather of concepts for predicting the probable course of industry evolution is the familiar ."
"Early entry is appropriate when the following general circumstances hold:"
"Quasi-integration is to use debt or equity investments and other means to create alliances between vertically related firms without full ownership."
"The essential complement to the path-breaking book Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter’s Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter’s groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into “activities,” or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage."
"There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness. Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different. Operational effectiveness is about things that you really shouldn't have to make choices on; it's about what's good for everybody and about what every business should be doing."
"The success of a strategy depends on doing many things well – not just a few – and integrating among them."
"Business strategy probably predates Michael Porter. Probably. But today, it is hard to imagine confronting the discipline without reckoning with the Harvard Business School professor, perhaps the world's best-known business academic. His first book, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (Free Press, 1980), is in its 53rd printing and has been translated into 17 languages. For years, excerpts from that and other Porter works have been required reading in "Competition and Strategy," the first-year course that every Harvard MBA student must take. Porter's strategy frameworks have suffered some ambivalence over the years in academic circles — yet they have proved wildly compelling among business leaders around the world."
"When you read what’s in the World Economic Forum Competitiveness Yearbooks, you think this is just sort simplistic, arbitrary and vague. Nevertheless, these are also comfort blankets for high-level executives, it gives them what they need, hence commanding such fees. So if I am a bit scornful it is only because people like Michael Porter are manifestly and deliberately in the business of over-simplification. He did it for Ronald Regan in the mid-80s, he’s been doing it for corporations since the 70s, and he’s been doing it ever since. He produces methodological tools through which the world gets governed... Whereas Hayek sought to remind us that the world cannot be easily reduced to a set of simple facts, Porter has built his career on seeking to demonstrate precisely the opposite."
"Billions are wasted on ineffective philanthropy. Philanthropy is decades behind business in applying rigorous thinking to the use of money."
"Change brings opportunities. On the other hand, change can be confusing."
"Billions are wasted on ineffective philanthropy. Philanthropy is decades behind business in applying rigorous thinking to the use of money."
"If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems."
"The underlying principles of strategy are enduring, regardless of technology or the pace of change."
"I teach in the medical school, the School of Public Health, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Business School. And it's the best perch... because most of my work crosses boundaries."
"Ultimately, health care fails the most basic test. It's not organized around the needs of the patient."
"Good leaders need a positive agenda, not just an agenda of dealing with crisis."
"Technology has given us this wonderful opportunity to have low energy costs. We have to seize that, rather than keep debating and discussing and fighting over it."
"The ability to change constantly and effectively is made easier by high-level continuity."
"Millennials are more aware of society's many challenges than previous generations and less willing to accept maximizing shareholder value as a sufficient goal for their work. They are looking for a broader social purpose and want to work somewhere that has such a purpose."
"Health care historically has been a very siloed field that's organized around medical specialties - urology, cardiac surgery, and so forth - and around the supply of these specialty services. The patient is the ping-pong ball that moves from service to service."