Competitive Strategy
Now nearing its sixtieth printing in English and translated into nineteen languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity—like all great breakthroughs—Porter’s analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies—lowest cost, differentiation, and focus—which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment. More than a million managers in both large and small companies, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world have internalized Porter's ideas and applied them to assess industries, understand competitors, and choose competitive positions. The ideas in the book address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of the ways companies go about competing.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
25mentions
20people
2008–2025years
44% recommend52% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- While there is certainly a lot of crap out there for business books, especially on sales/marketing and management, there are some core books that are must reads if you want to save 30 years of trial and error.
1. E-myth Revisited (absolute must read for small to midsize business owners) 2. Competitive Strategy 3. Discipline of Market Leaders 4. Good to Great 5. Built to Last
- Michael Porter's books on marketing (esp. "Competitive Strategy") are well-regarded.
- For a contrarian argument, it is worth considering the advice of Michael Porter in his seminal study "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors" (published in 1980):
> Some argue that firms should not choose competitive positions at all but concentrate on staying flexible, incorporating new ideas, or building up critical resources or core competencies that are portrayed as independent of competitive position. I respectfully disagree. Staying flexible in strategic terms renders competitive advantage almost unobtainable. Jumping from strategy to strategy makes it impossible to be good at implementing any of them. Continuous incorporation of new ideas is important to maintaining operational effectiveness, but this surely is not inconsistent with having a firm strategic position (xv-xvi)... A strategic position is a path, not a fixed location (xiv).
In other words, there is no such animal as a "fully diversified" entrepreneurial business (unless your business is simply investing money in a diversified stock portfolio). The very concept of a (non-financial) capitalist enterprise implies some degree of specialization. Even YC, to some extent, specializes and focuses their investments in certain high-tech industries.
- If you find this article interesting, Coursera's "Competitive Strategy" [1] is a pretty good introduction on the topic of game theory and how it can be used as a decision-making framework for business, I've found.
As a case study, I recommend watching this episode of "Golden Balls" [2], which shows how a player can manipulate a game outcome and defeat the natural Nash equilibria. This is a classic IMO.
- > Are there good startup-oriented books on go-to-market strategy, distribution channels and business models?
- Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter. (But just reading the HBR On Strategy book is probably good enough to get you started.)
- Positioning by Trout & Ries
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas
If you search for things like 'marketing channels map', there are plenty of results. But it's more important to have a few key tactics that play into your strategy, and then your engagement with the rest of the marketing channels is going to be pretty generic for most businesses.
And I don't think there is an authoritative encyclopedia of business models, or at least there wasn't the last time I looked into it.
- Developing strategy, relies on understanding the patterns evident in the mechanics of doing business, (startups and mature corps alike).
To that end, I strongly recommend Michael Porter, who literally wrote the book on modern "Competitive Strategy". There is no other single source of strategic theory that is better than this. Anybody that has taken a b-school class on strategy worth their tuition will recall concepts like Porter's 5-forces.
Other answers seem to offer more recently offered books and some might dare to argue his frameworks are dated but really it's in a robust, tried-and-true-kind of way. Other books that try to cover defining strategy, value chain, industry analysis are often derivative of his work.
If you don't end up reading it at least get a list of his key concepts and google the shit out of them. They all seem like a "duh, i knew that" on paper, but you should have these theories in your back pocket whenever you need to formulate a battleplan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_generic_strategies
http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Indust...
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