Michael E. Porter Quotes

What are the alternative industries to your industry? Why do customers trade across them? By focusing on the key factors that lead buyers to trade across alternative industries and eliminating or reducing everything else, you can create a blue ocean of new market space.

innovative ideas will be profitable only if they are linked to what buyers are willing to pay for.

senior managers’ goal here should be to manage their portfolio of businesses to wisely balance between profitable growth and cash flow at a given point in time.

Shift from convergence to divergence

While good strategy content is based on a compelling value proposition for buyers with a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating-people proposition.

Experiences that don’t involve touching, seeing, or feeling actual results, such as being presented with an abstract sheet of numbers, are shown to be non-impactful and easily forgotten.

Focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors

Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is. And a closer look reveals that most plans don’t contain a strategy at all but rather a smorgasbord of tactics that individually make sense but collectively don’t add up to a unified, clear direction that sets a company apart — let alone makes the competition irrelevant. Does this sound like the strategic plans in your company?

As shown in figure 2-2, to break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost and to create a new value curve, there are four key questions to challenge an industry’s strategic logic and business model: Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated? Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard? Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard? Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

The key here is not to pursue pricing against the competition within an industry but rather to pursue pricing against substitutes and alternatives across industries and nonindustries.

to win in the future, companies must stop competing with each other. The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.

To tip the cognitive hurdle fast, tipping point leaders such as Bratton zoom in on the act of disproportionate influence: making people see and experience harsh reality firsthand.

Simply put, there is no substitute for meeting and listening to dissatisfied customers directly.

The planning process doesn’t produce strategy

The Pivotal Lever: Disproportionate Influence Factors The key to tipping point leadership is concentration, not diffusion. Tipping point leadership builds on the rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization, there are people, acts, and activities that exercise