Michael Porter (born 1947) is the doyen of living management gurus, a professor at Harvard Business School whose office is a whole on-campus house, home of his own Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. A talented sportsman (like Frederick Winslow Taylor), Porter could have became a professional golf player.
The Economist once said (see article): “His work is academic to a fault. Mr Porter is about as likely to produce a blockbuster full of anecdotes and boosterish catchphrases as he is to deliver a lecture dressed in bra and stockings.” He has been criticised for his willingness to boil his thoughts down into a series of bullet points, each of them with a ploddingly unmemorable title. Unlike many of his colleagues, Porter is frustratingly unquotable. Charles Handy once said: “Influence, not popularity, is what Michael Porter wants.” He never, for example, allows his books to be published in paperback.
Nevertheless, Porter effectively redefined the way that businessmen think about competition, largely by introducing the language and concepts of economics into corporate strategy. He began by simplifying the notion of competitive advantage and then created a new framework for companies to think about how to achieve it.
Later he moved on to advising countries about how they too could gain competitive advantage, and this led him to another field of interest, clustering—the extent to which industries old and new (from diamond dealers to nanotechnologists) stay geographically close to each other, and the reasons for this. Porter maintained that countries do well economically in large part because of this clustering of specialised skills and industries that, through dynamic competition between them, produce superior products and processes.
More recently, Porter has started to write about health care and corporate social responsibility, applying his thinking about competition to social issues. Indeed, so broad did his interests become that in 2000 he was made a professor of Harvard University, with a free-ranging remit, only the fourth Harvard Business School faculty member ever to be so honoured.
Like many leading management thinkers, Porter trained first as an engineer. Then, after a doctorate in economics, he moved to Harvard Business School. Apart from being a bestselling author, Porter also found time to set up a successful global consulting firm called Monitor. He can command top-dollar fees for personal appearances—his own competitive weapon being differentiation, not low cost.
Notable publications
“Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analysing Industries and Competitors”, Free Press, New York, 1980; 2nd edn, Free Press, New York and London, 1998
“Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance”, Collier Macmillan, London, 1985; 2nd edn, Free Press, New York and London, 1998
“What is Strategy?”, Harvard Business Review, November–December 1996
“Strategy and the Internet”, Harvard Business Review, March 2001
With Kramer, M., “Strategy and Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility”, Harvard Business Review, December 2006
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