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HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter) QUOTES

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter) QUOTES

1 " Understanding industry structure is also essential to effective strategic positioning P. 26 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

2 " Understanding the competitive forces, and their underlying causes, reveals the roots of an industry’s current profitability while providing a framework for anticipating and influencing competition (and profitability) over time. P. 26 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

3 " The strongest competitive force or forces determine the profitability of an industry and become the most important to strategy formulation. The most salient force, however, is not always obvious. P. 26 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

4 " If the forces are intense, (..) almost no company earns attractive returns on investment.

If the forces are benign, (..) many companies are profitable. P. 25 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

5 " In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition. P. 25 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

6 " Competitive forces = the underlying drivers of profitability P.25 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

7 " Consensus is a worthy goal, but as a decision-making standard, it can be an obstacle to action or a recipe for lowest-common-denominator compromise. A more practical objective is to get everyone involved to buy in to the decision. "

― Marcia W. Blenko , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

8 " To create an effective envisioned future requires a certain level of unreasonable confidence and commitment. Keep in mind that a BHAG is not just a goal; it is a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

9 " Business models need to have the flexibility to change in their early years. "

― Mark W. Johnson , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

10 " If it’s not core, change it!

Once you are clear about the core ideology, you should feel free to change absolutely anything that is not part of it. From then on, whenever someone says something should not change because “it’s part of our culture” or “we’ve always done it that way” or any such excuse, mention this simple rule: If it’s not core, it’s up for change. The strong version of the rule is, If it’s not core, change it! Articulating core ideology is just a starting point, however. You also must determine what type of progress you want to stimulate. "

― James C. Collins , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

11 " Strategy can be viewed as building defenses against the competitive forces or finding a position in the industry where the forces are weakest. P.35 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

12 " Large R&D budgets are not the key to creating new market space. The key is making the right strategic moves. "

― W. Chan Kim , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

13 " know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them "

― Marcia W. Blenko , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

14 " For Tata Motors to fulfill the requirements of its customer value proposition and profit formula for the Nano, it had to reconceive how a car is designed, manufactured, and distributed. Tata built a small team of fairly young engineers who would not, like the company’s more-experienced designers, be influenced and constrained in their thinking by the automaker’s existing profit formulas. This team dramatically minimized the number of parts in the vehicle, resulting in a significant cost saving. "

― Mark W. Johnson , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

15 " Blue oceans are right next to you in every industry. "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

16 " Competition on dimensions other than price - on product features, support services, delivery time, or brand image, for instance - is less likely to erode profitability because it improves customer value and can support higher prices. p.32 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

17 " Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value. "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

18 " Operational effectiveness: necessary but not sufficient Operational effectiveness and strategy are both essential to superior performance, which, after all, is the primary goal of any enterprise. But they work in very different ways. A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both. The arithmetic of superior profitability then follows: delivering greater value allows a company to charge higher average unit prices; greater efficiency results in lower average unit costs. Ultimately, all differences between companies in cost or price derive from the hundreds of activities required to create, produce, sell, and deliver their products or services, such as calling on customers, assembling final products, and training employees. Cost is generated by performing activities, and cost advantage arises from performing particular activities more "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

19 " As important as the dimensions of rivalry is whether rivals compete on the same dimensions. When all or many competitors aim to meet the same needs or compete on the same attributes, the result is zero-sum competition. P. 33 "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)

20 " General management is more than the stewardship of individual functions. Its core is strategy: defining and communicating the company’s unique position, making trade-offs, and forging fit among activities. "

― Michael E. Porter , HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)