The Competitive Advantage
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. With over 30
printings in English and translated into thirteen languages, this second volume in
Porter's landmark trilogy describes how a firm actually gains an advantage over its
rivals. 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.
Now an essential part of
international business thinking, Competitive Advantage takes strategy from broad vision to
an internally consistent configuration of activities. Its powerful framework provides the
tools to understand the drivers of cost and a company's relative cost position. Porter's
value chain enables managers to isolate the underlying sources of buyer value that will
command a premium price, and the reasons why one product or service substitutes for
another. He shows how competitive advantage lies not only in activities themselves but in
the way activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer
activities. Competitive Advantage also provides for the first time the tools to
strategically segment an industry and rigorously assess the competitive logic of
diversification.
That the phrases
"competitive advantage" and "sustainable competitive advantage" have
become commonplace is testimony to the power of Porter's ideas. Competitive Advantage has
guided countless companies, business school students, and scholars in understanding the
roots of competition. Porter's work captures the extraordinary complexity of competition
in a way that makes strategy both concrete and actionable.
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.
556 pages