Understanding Michael Porter

The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy

By: Joan Magretta

Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt

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 to grasp Porter’s seminal ideas about competition and strategy and deploy them to achieve competitive success.

©2011 Joan Magretta (P)2011 Gildan Media Corp

Useful information

What made the experience of listening to Understanding Michael Porter the most enjoyable?

The contents of the audio book will provide good reference points for individuals new to strategy. Many everyday conventions readily accepted in the work place are competently dismissed using Porter's models. Even if you don't come away with a complete understanding of strategy, you will undoubtedly acquire new ways of thinking about strategy and competitive advantage. Porter's 1996 Harvard Business Review article, "What is Strategy?" is a good bite-sized companion to this audio book. It is readily available online.

Awful narration- read the book

Narrator tries to sound sophisticated and completely distracts from the content. Hopefully the end of his narration career. Unlistenable

A very handy digest of Michael Porter's thought

Michael Porter's influential ideas are developed and presented over many books and articles and include multiple examples. I would assume that MBA's specializing in strategy will have read much of that material, but for the rest of us there is Joan Magretta's book. It feels like an excellent primer that highlights the conceptual cohesion behind Michael Porter's thought. The shortest HBR collection of Porter's articles is at least twice as long as this book, so it really makes sense to start here to get the high-level concepts down before taking the plunge into the original works. It's not that Porter is difficult to understand, it's just that it takes a while to tease out the relationships between different concepts, and not all of us lay people have the bandwidth for that.

Clear and actionable

After years of observing, less than clear and compelling strategies, or feeling like those conversations happen outside of my view, this helps explain so much about how to make strategy effective in my current and future rules.

Horrible narrator

Very hard to focus by the way the book was narrated. This is the first time it happened to me, I’ve listened to at least 50 books so far

An Excellent Synopsis of Michael Porter

This is a concise distillation of Michael Porter, who changed the academic business world by his insights on competition and business strategy.

The summary is written by Joan Magenta, a Bain Capital alum who worked directly with Porter. It is accurate to the original Porter material. It even captures the evolution of Porter's insights over the years.

Because of the author's own experience in the business world (as opposed to having only academic business experience) the principles are presented so they can be readily understood by business professionals.

Magretta's experience as an editor shows in her writing style. She writes concisely, precisely, and with humor. I didn't expect to laugh while reading a precis of deep academic work. But I did. Bravo.

If you don't have the time to digest years of Porter, this short work will serve you well.

On the other hand, if you studied Porter, but your "Five Forces" summary is getting rusty, this is a great refresher.

Finally, if your MBA came, not from Harvard Business School, but was awarded by the business school of hard knocks, this will give you insight into an important part of what your MBA-burnished colleagues were supposed to have learned about competition and business strategy. You may even find that Magretta imparts more Porter than your business school associates can recall.

A fine read - highly recommended

Understanding Michael Porter covers the core curriculum of Porters thinking on Strategy. The book does a fine job of framing and explaining the key concepts of the Porter approach to Strategy. I particularly liked the framing and use of examples in the first half of the book.

Top of the shelf business book.

This book is amazing. Everything is very clearly laid out, and there is no filler.
The narrator does sounds like Steve Martin at times, but that is easily overlooked - I have certainly heard worse.

Excellent Synthesis of Strategy Masterworks

Strategy expert and author does a great job modernizing and orchestrating Porters seminal works on strategy.

Great content

The content is excellent. I had a hard time with the narrator. Did not care for his style.