The essential complement to the pathbreaking 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.

Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance

Business & Money

MICHAEL E. PORTER

Economics

Free Press

This report ranks more than 65 countries in: tariffs and quotas; hidden import barriers; foreign exchange; export policy; export credits and insurace; exchange rate alignment and volatility; and 179 other criteria.

Global Competitiveness Report 2000

International

Oxford Univ Pr, Cary, North Carolina, U.S.A.

In Can Japan Compete?, world-renowned competition strategist Michael Porter and his colleagues explain why American assumptions about Japan have proved so inaccurate, what Japan must do to regain its strength, and what its journey can tell us about how to succeed in the new global economy.The research behind this book began in the early 1990s, at a time when Japan's economic success was overwhelmingly credited to the Japanese government and its unique management policies. Porter and his colleagues started by asking a crucial but previously overlooked question: If Japanese government policies and practices accounted for the nation's extraordinary competitiveness, then why wasn't Japan competitive in many of the industries where those policies had been prominently implemented? The authors and a team of colleagues surveyed a vast array of Japanese industries. This surprising book is the result of their work. The continuing influence of Japanese government and management strategies worldwide makes Can Japan Compete? a must read for anyone competing in the global economy.

Can Japan Compete?

Hirotaka Takeuchi

Mariko Sakakibara

Basic Books

Competitive Advantage

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.

The Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

The World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness Report evaluates the potential for sustained economic growth of over 130 developed and emerging economies and ranks them accordingly. Since its first release in 1979, the Report has become the most authoritative and comprehensive study of its type.
The 2007-2008 Report contains:
• Detailed country competitiveness profiles of 131 economies
• Data tables for survey and hard data variables ranking profiled economies
• Global rankings: the Global Competitiveness Index and the Business Competitiveness Index, measuring growth and productivity, respectively
• Exclusive data from the Executive Opinion Survey, with over 11,000 responses from business leaders worldwide.
Produced in collaboration with a distinguished group of international scholars and a global network of over 130 leading national research institutes and business organizations, the Report also showcases the latest thinking and research on issues of immediate relevance for business leaders and policy-makers.

The Global Competitiveness Report 2007-2008

Klaus Schwab

Xavier Sala i Martín

History

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Is your company spending too much time on strategy development—with too little to show for it?
If you read nothing else on strategy, read these 10 articles (featuring “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.
HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy will inspire you to:
• Distinguish your company from rivals • Clarify what your company will and won't do • Craft a vision for an uncertain future • Create blue oceans of uncontested market space • Use the Balanced Scorecard to measure your strategy • Capture your strategy in a memorable phrase • Make priorities explicit • Allocate resources early • Clarify decision rights for faster decision making

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy

W. Chan Kim

Renée Mauborgne

Harvard, Business Review

Management & Leadership

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Business Fundamentals: Competitive Strategy (From Harvard Business School Publishing)

Pankaj Ghemawat

Sayan Chatterjee

Gary P. Pisano

Jan W. Rivkin

Kenneth S. Corts

Harvard Business School

What and whom is a business for? This collection of articles gathers the latest thinking on the strategic significance of corporate social responsibility. Readers will develop an understanding of why businesses should continue to give money away even while laying off workers, how companies play a leadership role in today's social problems by incorporating the best thinking of governments and nonprofit institutions, and how community needs are actually opportunities to develop ideas and demonstrate business technologies. Readers will see how corporate responsibility can lead to new markets and solutions to long-standing business problems.

Harvard Business Review on Corporate Responsibility (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series)

Harvard Business School Press

C.K.Prahalad

Business Culture

Harvard Business Press

The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing premiums—not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets. In Redefining Health Care, internationally renowned strategy expert Michael Porter and innovation expert Elizabeth Teisberg reveal the underlying—and largely overlooked—causes of the problem, and provide a powerful prescription for change. The authors argue that competition currently takes place at the wrong level—among health plans, networks, and hospitals—rather than where it matters most, in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of specific health conditions. Participants in the system accumulate bargaining power and shift costs in a zero-sum competition, rather than creating value for patients. Based on an exhaustive study of the U.S. health care system, Redefining Health Care lays out a breakthrough framework for redefining the way competition in health care delivery takes place—and unleashing stunning improvements in quality and efficiency. With specific recommendations for hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, and policy makers, this book shows how to move health care toward positive-sum competition that delivers lasting benefits for all.

Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results

Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Harvard Business Review Press

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Books by MICHAEL E. PORTER