Understanding Michael Porter  (English, Hardcover, Magretta Joan)

Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide To Competition And Strategy is a descriptive book-length summary of Porter's core concepts related to competition and strategy.

Summary Of The Book

Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide To Competition And Strategy is a comprehensive book providing a summary of Porter’s ideas and a link between Porter’s different concepts, and informs how they are connected to the practical situations in life. The main concepts covered in this book are competitive advantage, five forces, differentiation, the value chain, relative cost and industry structure.

Michael Porter is known for his groundbreaking concepts about how companies can achieve and sustain competitive success. However, not everybody in business is able to decipher Porter’s concepts and thus working managers are unable to use them properly in real life. This book provides the first concise and easy to understand summary of Porter’s revolutionary ideas.

Written by Joan Magretta, Porter’s former editor at Harvard Business Review, this is a book that helps readers recognize a good or bad strategy and tell the difference between a solid strategy and the latest management fad. Written with Porter’s full cooperation, it quotes company examples to illustrate Porter’s ideas.

In Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide To Competition And Strategy, Magretta demystifies the most common misconceptions about Porter’s concepts. The book teaches that competition is about being unique and not being the best. It is not a battle between rivals, but a contest over profits. Elucidating Porter’s principles, the book says that strategy is about choosing to make some customers unhappy.

The main focus of the book is on competition and strategy. It is divided into two parts. The first part explains what competition is and the second part details what strategy is. Magretta has designed the book for managers and those professionals who advise and work with them. The introduction includes a chapter-by-chapter roadmap detailing what the book consists of. A special feature of Magretta’s book is that it incorporates an original Q&A with Porter himself. In this section, eminent managers will find answers to their FAQs.

Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide To Competition And Strategy is a distillation of the innovative ideas of one of the most famous business thinkers in the world. His seminal ideas on competition and strategy will enable all managers to grasp these ideas and execute them to achieve competitive success in any organization.

About Joan Magretta

Joan Magretta is an author and senior institute associate.

She has also written What Management Is: How It Works And Why It’s Everyone's Business.

She works as a senior associate with the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School. Prior to that, she has worked as a partner with Bain & Co. She did her MBA from Harvard in 1983 and later pursued Ph.D in literature from the University of Michigan. She has won the McKinsey award for a Harvard Business Review article.