Michael Porter Quotes

Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete.

It's important to have a really clear strategy so when you are in business, you only have to make micro-strategy changes.

Just like football, business is a game of inches, where the smallest advancement or advantage can mean the difference between winning and losing.

With experience also comes the understanding that you have to beat the rally before you can beat the competition.

A strategy delineates a territory in which a company seeks to be unique.

The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

Competitive strategies is a concept or philosophy that's as American as apple pie.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values.

Business is the systematic playing of games.

The two most fundamental strategic choices are deciding where to play and how to win.

Strategy is choice. Strategy means saying no to certain kinds of things.

Just like a script, you need to keep a business plan to yourself.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

Good decisions can have bad short-term outcomes but be great for the business long-term.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

The essential element of successful strategy is that it derives its success from the differences between competitors with a consequent difference in their behavior.

As I've said, in 2007, we're free to go and we'll just have to do what's best for the business.

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

People must be realistic when evaluating their business.

Just as predatory animals follow a similar general design and behave in similar ways, so organizations, especially those in competition with one another, must follow certain design principles if they are to succeed and prevail.

We can reorient our products and business strategy because we are an agile organisation.

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.