A Distillation of The Most Important Business Thinking of Our Time

Michael Porter's groundbreaking ideas on competition and strategy have unfolded over three decades and are spread across a dauntingly long list of publications. Every manager can name individual pieces of his work-competitive advantage, the value chain, five forces-but no one, not even Porter himself, has put the entire puzzle together to reveal it as an integrated whole. This lucid, concise audiobook does just that.

Written with Porter's full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this book provides an engaging summary of Porter's ideas and an invaluable synthesis of this important body of work, making clear how each of Porter's powerful concepts relates to the others and, most important, to the practical realities managers face.

Modern thinking about competition and strategy begins with Porter's frameworks. They are the most widely used in practice by managers around the world. But as Magretta points out, Porter is often misunderstood and his frameworks misapplied. Magretta's own wide-ranging business experience allows her to identify the most common of these misconceptions-among them, the deeply held but dangerous belief that competition is about being the best. Understand Porter and you will see why competing to be the best sparks an inevitable race to the bottom.

Understanding Michael Porter will enable all leaders throughout any organization t grasp Porter's seminal ideas about competition and strategy and deploy them to achieve competitive success.

琼•马格丽塔（Joan Magretta），管理咨询师和作家，《哈佛商业评论》麦肯锡奖获得者，与迈克尔•波特共事20年之久。曾经是著名的贝恩国际管理咨询公司的合伙人，也是《哈佛商业评论》的优秀撰稿人，并在20世纪90年代担任该杂志的高级战略编辑。

2002年出版《什么是管理》一书，获得波特、德鲁克等人一致好评，并被评为《商业周刊》、《经济学家》年度最佳商业图书，被一些管理专家学者称为管理的“圣经”。