Innovatia

seven other university. He has also published over 80 articles, four of which won the McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review ar- ticle of the year. In 1991, he received the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award for his outstanding con- tribution to the field of marketing and strategy given by the American Marketing Association. In 1991, Professor Porter was honoured by the Massachusetts State Legislature for his work on Massachusetts’ competitiveness. In 1993, the Academy of Management named him the Rich- ard D. Irwin Outstanding Educator in Business Policy and Strategy. Professor Porter also consults widely to gov- ernments and industry, including AT&T, Credit Suisse, Du Pont, Proctor & Gamble and Royal Dutch Shell. Do you believe your long-term views on what creates a competitive advantage have been vindicated in recent years? I feel events are now showing that some of the fundamental things that I have been talking and writing about for some time seem reasonably robust. I delayed publishing a book when I was concerned two or three years ago that it was not the right moment. There was too much new economy, although I didn’t anticipate the kind of corporate governance scandals we have now. I anticipated that the balloon would come out of the Internet and out of corporate performance, but the scandals have telescoped that. You once said that you felt a degree of loss of relevance in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What happened then? I redirected most of my energy around the com- petitiveness and economic development part of

my work, and was quite proud of The Compet- itive Advantage of Nations book, and the influ- ence that this body of work was having. I retreat- ed from strategy for a number of years, partly because I was doing something else, and partly because we have a Competitive Strategies Group at Harvard, which I had built, and was trying to provide space for others to take the ball in the field. For better or for worse, I was a 900-pound gorilla. If I worked on something it would tend to get the attention. When you are in the position I was in, in those days with strategy, it becomes very tempting, at least for academics, to use the work of the “leader” as the foil. There were many articles and books written that started out with “Well, Porter says this…” Yes, and every time you picked up a textbook. Right. And the second paragraph would be how it was wrong and that someone had a new way of doing it. The combination of those things led me to back away a little bit from the field but I remained interested. In about 1995, I finished what I was doing on the competitiveness of na- tions and focused on strategy again. There was a burst of activity for about two years, and out of that came the article: What is Strategy? For Company culture needs to be more systematic – based not on what is universally thought of as a good culture but on what fits the strategy and position in the marketplace.

STRATEGIC THOUGHTS FOR COMPETITIVE COMPANIES Professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School is considered by many to be one of the most influential thinkers in the world on business strategy. He talks to Graham Hand about how he forms his ideas.

P rofessor Porter has been at the forefront of competition theory and economic development research for 25 years and is only the fourth faculty member in the his- tory of the Business School to earn the Pro- fessor distinction.

He is the author of 16 books, of which several are compulsory reading for major MBA, finance and marketing degree courses around the world. He has won numerous awards and honours, in- cluding the Wells Prize in Economics, the Adam Smith Award and Honorary Doctorates from

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