Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy

Strategy emerges from four key questions: Who are your best potential clients? What do they need, want, or expect? Is there a demand for your product/service? Who are your competitors?

In the 1980s and ’90s, my colleague Michael E. Porter broke important new ground in the field. His watershed came in firming up the Opportunities and Threats side of the analysis by bringing much-needed economic theory and empirical evidence to strategy’s underpinnings, providing a far more sophisticated way to assess a firm’s competitive environme