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What Is Strategy?
by Michael E. Porter
Included with this full-text
Harvard Business Review
article:
The Idea in Brief—the core idea
The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work
Article Summary
What Is Strategy?
A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further
exploration of the article’s ideas and applications
22
Further Reading
Reprint 96608
3
4
What Is Strategy?
The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice
COPYRIGHT © 2000 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
The myriad activities that go into creating,
producing, selling, and delivering a product
or service are the basic units of competitive
advantage.
Operational effectiveness
means performing these activities better—
that is, faster, or with fewer inputs and
defects—than rivals. Companies can reap
enormous advantages from operational ef-
fectiveness, as Japanese firms demon-
strated in the 1970s and 1980s with such
practices as total quality management and
continuous improvement. But from a com-
petitive standpoint, the problem with oper-
ational effectiveness is that best practices
are easily emulated. As all competitors in an
industry adopt them, the
productivity
frontier
—the maximum value a company
can deliver at a given cost, given the best
available technology, skills, and manage-
ment techniques—shifts outward, lowering
costs and improving value at the same
time. Such competition produces absolute
improvement in operational effectiveness,
but relative improvement for no one. And
the more benchmarking that companies
do, the more
competitive convergence
you have—that is, the more indistinguish-
able companies are from one another.
Strategic positioning
attempts to achieve
sustainable competitive advantage by
preserving what is distinctive about a com-
pany. It means performing
different
activi-
ties from rivals, or performing
similar
activi-
ties in different ways.
Three key principles underlie strategic positioning.
1. Strategy is the creation of a unique and
valuable position, involving a different set
of activities.
Strategic position emerges from
three distinct sources:
•
serving few needs of many customers (Jiffy
Lube provides only auto lubricants)
•
serving broad needs of few customers
(Bessemer Trust targets only very high-
wealth clients)
•
serving broad needs of many customers
in a narrow market (Carmike Cinemas op-
erates only in cities with a population
under 200,000)
2. Strategy requires you to make trade-offs
in competing—to choose what
not
to do.
Some competitive activities are incompatible;
thus, gains in one area can be achieved only
at the expense of another area. For example,
Neutrogena soap is positioned more as a me-
dicinal product than as a cleansing agent. The
company says “no” to sales based on deodor-
izing, gives up large volume, and sacrifices
manufacturing efficiencies. By contrast, Maytag’s
decision to extend its product line and ac-
quire other brands represented a failure to
make difficult trade-offs: the boost in reve-
nues came at the expense of return on sales.
3. Strategy involves creating “fit” among a
company’s activities.
Fit has to do with the
ways a company’s activities interact and rein-
force one another. For example, Vanguard
Group aligns all of its activities with a low-cost
strategy; it distributes funds directly to con-
sumers and minimizes portfolio turnover. Fit
drives both competitive advantage and sus-
tainability: when activities mutually reinforce
each other, competitors can’t easily imitate
them. When Continental Lite tried to match a
few of Southwest Airlines’ activities, but not
the whole interlocking system, the results
were disastrous.
Employees need guidance about how to
deepen a strategic position rather than
broaden or compromise it. About how to ex-
tend the company’s uniqueness while
strengthening the fit among its activities. This
work of deciding which target group of cus-
tomers and needs to serve requires discipline,
the ability to set limits, and forthright commu-
nication. Clearly, strategy and leadership are
inextricably linked.
page 3
What Is Strategy?
by Michael E. Porter
harvard business review • november–december 1996
COPYRIGHT © 1996 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
I. Operational Effectiveness Is Not
Strategy
For almost two decades, managers have been
learning to play by a new set of rules. Compa-
nies must be ffexible to respond rapidly to
competitive and market changes. They must
benchmark continuously to achieve best prac-
tice. They must outsource aggressively to gain
efficiencies. And they must nurture a few core
competencies in race to stay ahead of rivals.
Positioning—once the heart of strategy—is
rejected as too static for today’s dynamic mar-
kets and changing technologies. According to
the new dogma, rivals can quickly copy any
market position, and competitive advantage is,
at best, temporary.
But those beliefs are dangerous half-truths,
and they are leading more and more companies
down the path of mutually destructive compe-
tition. True, some barriers to competition are
falling as regulation eases and markets become
global. True, companies have properly invested
energy in becoming leaner and more nimble.
In many industries, however, what some call
hypercompetition
is a self-infficted wound, not
the inevitable outcome of a changing paradigm
of competition.
The root of the problem is the failure to dis-
tinguish between operational effectiveness and
strategy. The quest for productivity, quality, and
speed has spawned a remarkable number of
management tools and techniques: total quality
management, benchmarking, time-based com-
petition, outsourcing, partnering, reengineering,
change management. Although the resulting
operational improvements have often been
dramatic, many companies have been frustrated
by their inability to translate those gains into
sustainable profitability. And bit by bit, almost
imperceptibly, management tools have taken
the place of strategy. As managers push to im-
prove on all fronts, they move farther away
from viable competitive positions.
Operational Effectiveness: Necessary but Not
Sufficient.
Operational effectiveness and strategy
are both essential to superior performance,
which, after all, is the primary goal of any en-
terprise. But they work in very different ways.
page 4
What Is Strategy?
harvard business review • november–december 1996
A company can outperform rivals only if it can
establish a difference that it can preserve. It must
deliver greater value to customers or create
comparable value at a lower cost, or do both.
The arithmetic of superior profitability then fol-
lows: delivering greater value allows a company
to charge higher average unit prices; greater
efficiency results in lower average unit costs.
Ultimately, all differences between companies
in cost or price derive from the hundreds of ac-
tivities required to create, produce, sell, and de-
liver their products or services, such as calling
on customers, assembling final products, and
training employees. Cost is generated by per-
forming activities, and cost advantage arises
from performing particular activities more effi-
ciently than competitors. Similarly, differentia-
tion arises from both the choice of activities and
how they are performed. Activities, then are the
basic units of competitive advantage. Overall ad-
vantage or disadvantage results from all a com-
pany’s activities, not only a few.
1
Operational effectiveness (OE) means per-
forming similar activities
better
than rivals per-
form them. Operational effectiveness includes
but is not limited to efficiency. It refers to any
number of practices that allow a company to bet-
ter utilize its inputs by, for example, reducing de-
fects in products or developing better products
faster. In contrast, strategic positioning means
performing
different
activities from rivals’ or per-
forming similar activities in
different
ways.
Differences in operational effectiveness among
companies are pervasive. Some companies
are able to get more out of their inputs than
others because they eliminate wasted effort,
employ more advanced technology, motivate
employees better, or have greater insight into
managing particular activities or sets of activ-
ities. Such differences in operational effective-
ness are an important source of differences in
profitability among competitors because they
directly affect relative cost positions and
levels of differentiation.
Differences in operational effectiveness
were at the heart of the Japanese challenge to
Western companies in the 1980s. The Japa-
nese were so far ahead of rivals in operational
effectiveness that they could offer lower cost
and superior quality at the same time. It is
worth dwelling on this point, because so much
recent thinking about competition depends
on it. Imagine for a moment a
productivity
frontier
that constitutes the sum of all existing
best practices at any given time. Think of it as
the maximum value that a company deliver-
ing a particular product or service can create
at a given cost, using the best available tech-
nologies, skills, management techniques, and
purchased inputs. The productivity frontier
can apply to individual activities, to groups
of linked activities such as order processing
and manufacturing, and to an entire com-
pany’s activities. When a company improves
its operational effectiveness, it moves toward
the frontier. Doing so may require capital in-
vestment, different personnel, or simply new
ways of managing.
The productivity frontier is constantly shift-
ing outward as new technologies and man-
agement approaches are developed and as
new inputs become available. Laptop com-
puters, mobile communications, the Internet,
and software such as Lotus Notes, for exam-
ple, have redefined the productivity frontier
for sales-force operations and created rich
possibilities for linking sales with such activi-
ties as order processing and after-sales sup-
port. Similarly, lean production, which involves a
family of activities, has allowed substantial
improvements in manufacturing productivity
and asset utilization.
For at least the past decade, managers have
been preoccupied with improving operational
effectiveness. Through programs such as TQM,
time-based competition, and benchmarking,
they have changed how they perform activities
in order to eliminate inefficiencies, improve
customer satisfaction, and achieve best practice.
Hoping to keep up with shifts in the produc-
tivity frontier, managers have embraced con-
tinuous improvement, empowerment, change
management, and the so-called learning orga-
nization. The popularity of outsourcing and
the virtual corporation reffect the growing
recognition that it is difficult to perform all
activities as productively as specialists.
As companies move to the frontier, they can
often improve on multiple dimensions of per-
formance at the same time. For example, manu-
facturers that adopted the Japanese practice of
rapid changeovers in the 1980s were able to
lower cost and improve differentiation simul-
taneously. What were once believed to be
real trade-offs—between defects and costs, for
example—turned out to be illusions created by
poor operational effectiveness. Managers have
learned to reject such false trade-offs.
Michael E. Porter
is the C. Roland
Christensen Professor of Business
Administration at the Harvard Business
School in Boston, Massachusetts.
This article has benefited greatly
from the assistance of many individuals
and companies. The author gives spe-
cial thanks to Jan Rivkin, the coauthor
of a related paper. Substantial research
contributions have been made by
Nicolaj Siggelkow, Dawn Sylvester, and
Lucia Marshall. Tarun Khanna, Roger
Martin, and Anita McGahan have pro-
vided especially extensive comments.
page 5
What Is Strategy?
Constant improvement in operational ef-
fectiveness is necessary to achieve superior
profitability. However, it is not usually suffi-
cient. Few companies have competed success-
fully on the basis of operational effectiveness
over an extended period, and staying ahead of
rivals gets harder every day. The most obvious
reason for that is the rapid diffusion of best
practices. Competitors can quickly imitate
management techniques, new technologies,
input improvements, and superior ways of
meeting customers’ needs. The most generic
solutions—those that can be used in multiple
settings—diffuse the fastest. Witness the pro-
liferation of OE techniques accelerated by
support from consultants.
OE competition shifts the productivity fron-
tier outward, effectively raising the bar for
everyone. But although such competition pro-
duces absolute improvement in operational ef-
fectiveness, it leads to relative improvement
for no one. Consider the $5 billion-plus U.S.
commercial-printing industry. The major players—
R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Quebecor,
World Color Press, and Big Flower Press—are
competing head to head, serving all types of
customers, offering the same array of printing
technologies (gravure and web offset), in-
vesting heavily in the same new equipment,
gains are being captured by customers and
equipment suppliers, not retained in superior
profitability. Even industry-leader Donnelley’s
profit margin, consistently higher than 7% in
the 1980s, fell to less than 4.6% in 1995. This
pattern is playing itself out in industry after
industry. Even the Japanese, pioneers of the
new competition, suffer from persistently low
profits. (See the insert “Japanese Companies
Rarely Have Strategies.”)
The second reason that improved opera-
tional effectiveness is insufficient—competitive
convergence—is more subtle and insidious. The
more benchmarking companies do, the more
they look alike. The more that rivals out-
source activities to efficient third parties,
often the same ones, the more generic those
activities become. As rivals imitate one an-
other’s improvements in quality, cycle times,
or supplier partnerships, strategies converge
and competition becomes a series of races
down identical paths that no one can win.
Competition based on operational effective-
ness alone is mutually destructive, leading
to wars of attrition that can be arrested only
by limiting competition.
The recent wave of industry consolidation
through mergers makes sense in the context of
OE competition. Driven by performance pres-
