Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors

Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into nineteen languages, Competitive Strategy is a classic that has revolutionized business strategy for almost two decades. Porter pioneered the concept of industry analysis, which captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. He also introduced his three generic strategies — lowest cost, differentiation, and focus — which bring structure to strategic positioning. In this book, Porter presents a whole new perspective on how firms achieve superior profitability. He defines competitive advantage in terms of relative cost and relative prices and shows how profitability is linked directly to it. Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has also transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment. In summary, Porter's ideas address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of how companies go about competing. Competitive Strategy has filled a void in management thinking and provides a 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.