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.

瓊•馬格麗塔（Joan Magretta），管理谘詢師和作傢，《哈佛商業評論》麥肯锡奬獲得者，與邁剋爾•波特共事20年之久。曾經是著名的貝恩國際管理谘詢公司的閤夥人，也是《哈佛商業評論》的優秀撰稿人，並在20世紀90年代擔任該雜誌的高級戰略編輯。

2002年齣版《什麼是管理》一書，獲得波特、德魯剋等人一緻好評，並被評為《商業周刊》、《經濟學傢》年度最佳商業圖書，被一些管理專傢學者稱為管理的“聖經”。