Michael Porter Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

Michael Porter
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.

Michael Porter
The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy.

Michael Porter
Efforts to preserve all industries will lower the national standard of living.

Michael Porter
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.

Michael Porter
Early entry is appropriate when the following general circumstances hold:

Michael Porter
Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress. Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success. It is not on the margin of what companies do but at the center. We believe that it can give rise to the next major transformation of business thinking.

Michael Porter
The essence of formulating strategy is relating a company to its environment.

Michael Porter
Quasi-integration is to use debt or equity investments and other means to create alliances between vertically related firms without full ownership.

Michael Porter
The grandfather of concepts for predicting the probable course of industry evolution is the familiar product life cycle.

Michael Porter
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.

Michael Porter
Risk is a function of how poorly a strategy will perform if the 'wrong' scenario occurs.

Michael Porter
Low cost relative to competitors becomes the theme running through the entire strategy, though quality, service and other areas cannot be ignored.

Michael Porter
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.

Michael Porter
The success of a strategy depends on doing many things well – not just a few – and integrating among them.

Michael Porter