Competitive Advantage - Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance

Description
The essential complement to the pathbreaking book Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm.

Program

Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into 'activities', or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage. Now an essential part of international business thinking, Competitive Advantage takes strategy from broad vision to an internally consistent configuration of activities. Its powerful framework provides the tools to understand the drivers of cost and a company's relative cost position. Porter's value chain enables managers to isolate the underlying sources of buyer value that will command a premium price, and the reasons why one product or service substitutes for another. He shows how competitive advantage lies not only in activities themselves but in the way activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer activities.

That the phrases 'competitive advantage' and 'sustainable competitive advantage' have become commonplace is testimony to the power of Porter's ideas. Competitive Advantage has guided countless companies, business school students, and scholars in understanding the roots of competition. Porter's work captures the extraordinary complexity of competition in a way that makes strategy both concrete and actionable.

Reviews of the Book:

'The most influential management book of the past quarter century.'
- The Financial Times


Author: Michael E. Porter
Publisher: Free Press
ISBN 10: 0743260872
ISBN 13: 9780743260879
Pages: 576
Format: Soft Cover
Published Date: 19/01/2004
Availability: Ex Stock