ABSTRACT
Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors is based on an article that he wrote in the Harvard Business Review the year before, "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy". The article's focuses on how a business should analyze the environment in its sector to work out what its strategy should be if it is to be successful. In 1985, Porter published Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance as a companion to Competitive Strategy. Competitive Advantage introduced a key idea for which Porter is widely known: value chain. Porter's concept of the value chain quickly joined his ideas in Competitive Strategy on the pages of business textbooks and in management thought. In The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Porter considers competitiveness, and the forces behind it, at a national level. These concerns come from his worries over dramatic and enduring declines in how competitive American business is—anxieties that he fleshes out with a good deal of evidence.
