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Summary What Is Strategy Michael Porter PDF
Summary What Is Strategy Michael Porter PDF
Summary What Is Strategy Michael Porter PDF
New dynamics of competition: Competitive advantage is temporary, because rivals can quickly
copy any market position.
Operational Effectiveness means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them.
OE tries to enhance the productivity frontier. Achieving excellence in individual activities, or
functions.
Strategic positioning performing different activities from rivals’ or performing similar activities
in different ways.
Productivity frontier: the sum of all existing best practices at any given time. Lowest possible
cost delivering the highest value. State of best practice.
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Sources of competitive advantage:
● Delivering comparable value at lower costs
● Delivering greater value allowing to charge for a higher average price
Problems of OE competition:
● Imitation: Rapid diffusion of best practices.
● Competitive convergence: The more that rivals outsource activities to efficient third
parties, often the same ones, the more generic those activities become, racing on the
same path that no one can wins.
Results of OE competition:
● Diminishing results
● Zero-sum competition
● Static or declining prices
● Continues pressure to lower cost
Strategy: the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities. If
there were only one ideal position, there would be no need for strategy. The essence of
strategic positioning is to choose activities that are different from rivals’. Strategy is making
trade-offs in competing. Strategy is about combining activities.
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delivers another kind of value or attempts to deliver two inconsistent things at the same
time.
● Trade-offs arise from activities themselves: Different positions (with their tailored
activities) require different product configurations, different equipment, different
employee behavior, different skills, and different management systems.
● Limits on internal coordination and control and coordination: By clearly choosing
to compete in one way and not another, senior management makes organizational
priorities clear.
Trade-offs at productivity frontier: At the frontier, where companies have achieved current
best practice, the trade-off between cost and differentiation is very real indeed.
Fit: Configuration of individual activities and the arrangement of how they relate to one another.
The most valuable fit is strategy-specific because it enhances a position’s uniqueness and
amplifies trade-offs. Fit focuses on the entire system of activities that a company performs.
Types of fit:
● First-order fit: Simple consistency between each activity and overall strategy. All
activities are aligned with defined strategy. Consistency ensures that the competitive
advantages of activities cumulate and do not erode or cancel themselves out.
● Second-order fit: Activities are reinforcing and mutually supportive. It emphasize in the
way that each activity affects one another and synergies between the activities are build.
● Third-order fit: Optimization of effort. Coordination and information exchange across
activities to eliminate redundancy and minimize wasted effort.
The more a company’s positioning rests on activity systems with second- and third-order fit, the
more sustainable its advantage will be. Activities might be imitated quickly, but it is more difficult
to imitate the fit of different activities.
One implication is that strategic positions should have a horizon of a decade or more, not of a
single planning cycle.
Growth trap: Notion that Trade-offs and limits constrain growth, that serving one group of
customers and excluding others, for instance, places a real or imagined limit on revenue growth.
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Leadership