Michael Porter

Michael Porter is the most famous strategist in business sector of our decade, may be in our century. He is a Harvard Business School professor whose insights into competition have defined thinking about corporate strategy for the past generation and whose new volume, is a candidate to navigate the thinking of the new generation.

"Starting in the late 1980s, I fell off the radar screen in terms of writing about strategy," Porter says. The focus of his work shifted from corporations to economic development and regional competitiveness. While Porter continues to consult with states ranging from Catalonia to Canada, and to work on his Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, he's once again consulting for companies, including Procter & Gamble and Edward Jones. Porter's description of his work as vanishing from managerial sight is more than a bit of an exaggeration. "Porter is the single most important strategist working today, and maybe of all time," says Kevin Coyne of McKinsey & Co., whose verdict echoes that of the Strategic Management Society, which recently voted Porter the most influential living strategist. "People have not forgotten about him or his work."

He has many publications; ëOn Competitioní is a rebuttal of this "death of strategy" argument. It's also evidence of how much Porter has refined and broadened his thinking, most notably in the chapter "What Is Strategy?" first published in the Harvard Business Review two years ago and already regarded as a classic in the field.

For Porter, much of what has passed for management thinking in the past decade may have been important, but it wasn't strategy--and isn't nearly as crucial as good strategy. "Strategy is not accidental. It is a purposeful process," he says. "Luck is alive and well. Intuition is alive and well. But human beings have some control over their own destiny. And you can improve your odds of making better judgments."