With regard to one of Michael Porter‘s classic works, On Competition, Updated and Expanded Edition, in his own words:

“Competition is one of society’s most powerful forces for making things better in many fields of human endeavor. The study of competition and the creation of value, in their full richness, have preoccupied me for several decades. Competition is pervasive, whether it involves companies contesting markets, countries coping with globalization, or social organizations responding to societal needs. Every organization needs a strategy in order to deliver superior value to its customers.

“This is truer today than ever before, as competition has intensified dramatically over the last several decades in almost all domains. It has spread across geography, so that nations must compete to maintain their existing prosperity, much less enhance it. Competition has also spread to all sectors of society, including fields like the arts, education, health care, and philanthropy, where there are growing needs but scarce resources.

“Today organizations in all spheres must compete to deliver value. Value is the ability to meet or exceed the needs of customers, and do so efficiently. Companies have to deliver value to their customers, and countries have to deliver value as business locations. This is now just as true for a hospital delivering health care, or a foundation making charitable contributions, as it is for a company producing a product or service.

“Delivering social value—high social benefits per dollar expended—is fast becoming the imperative for any organization that seeks to advance the public good. In understanding competition and value creation, my aim is to capture the complexity of what actually happens on the ground. While trained as an economist and steeped in the discipline of economic reasoning, I have sought both to advance theory and make that theory operational for practitioners.

“My goal has been to develop rigorous and useful frame-works that effectively bridge the gap between theory and practice. This book brings together in one place the full range of concepts and tools I have developed to understand competition and value creation “

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Michael Porter is an economist, researcher, author, advisor, speaker and teacher. Throughout his career at Harvard Business School, he has brought economic theory and strategy concepts to bear on many of the most challenging problems facing corporations, economies and societies, including market competition and company strategy, economic development, the environment, and health care. His extensive research is widely recognized in governments, corporations, NGOs, and academic circles around the globe. His research has received numerous awards, and he is the most cited scholar today in economics and business. While Porter is, at the core, a scholar, his work has also achieved remarkable acceptance by practitioners across multiple fields.

To learn more about him and his work, please click here.