Introduction

Michael E. Porter is a leading authority on competitive strategy, the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions, and the application of competitive principles to social problems such as health care, the environment, and corporate responsibility. Professor Porter is generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field, as has been identified in a variety of rankings and surveys as the world’s most influential thinker on management and competitiveness.
He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School. A University professorship is the highest professional recognition that can be awarded to a Harvard faculty member. In 2001, Harvard Business School and Harvard University jointly created the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, dedicated to furthering Professor Porter’s work.
He is the author of 18 books and over 125 articles. He received a B.S.E. with high honors in aerospace and mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He received an M.B.A. with high distinction in 1971 from the Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1973.
Personal History

Professor Porter was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and lived and traveled throughout the world as the son of a career Army officer. He was an all-state high school football and baseball player in the state of New Jersey where he attended high school. At Princeton, he played intercollegiate golf and was New England champion. He was named to the 1968 NCAA Golf All-American Team. After graduating from college, Professor Porter served through the rank of captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. He maintains a long-time interest in the esthetics and business of music and art, having worked on the problems of strategy with arts organizations and aspiring musicians. Professor Porter has two daughters and resides in Brookline, Massachusetts. His work spans three broad areas: competition and company strategy (five forces, value chain); competition and economic development (clusters, diamond model); and competition and societal issues (health care, environment.
Career

Michael Porter is the founder of a nonprofit organization called the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and one of the founders of The Monitor Group. His main academic objectives focus on how a firm or a region can build a competitive advantage and develop competitive strategy.
He is also a Fellow Member of the Strategic Management Society. One of his most significant contributions is the five forces.
Porter's strategic system consists primarily of:
· Porter's Five Forces Analysis
· strategic groups (also called strategic sets)
· the value chain
· the generic strategies of cost leadership, product differentiation, and focus
· the market positioning strategies of variety based, needs based, and access based market positions
· global strategy
· Porter's clusters of competence for regional economic development
· Diamond model
Teaching

Professor Porter's ideas are the foundation for courses on strategy and competitiveness, and his work is taught at virtually every business school in the world. At Harvard, Professor Porter’s course, Microeconomics of Competitiveness, is a graduate course open to students from across the university. It is also taught in partnership with more than 80 other universities from every continent using curriculum, video content and instructor support developed at Harvard.
Professor Porter developed and chairs the New CEO Workshop, a Harvard Business School program for newly appointed CEOs of the world’s largest and more complex corporations. Held twice each year by invitation only, the workshop focuses on the challenges facing new CEOs in assuming leadership. His Harvard Business Review article with Jay Lorsch and Nitin Nohria, ‘Seven Surprises for New CEOs’ (October 2004), describes some of the learning from this ongoing body of work.Professor Porter speaks widely on strategy, competitiveness, health care delivery, related subjects to business, government, non-profit, and philanthropic leaders.
Research
1. Strategy

Professor Porter’s core field is competitive strategy, which remains a major focus of his research. His book, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, is in its 63rd printing and has been translated into 19 languages. His second major strategy book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, was published in 1985 and is in its 38th printing.
2. Competitiveness of Nations and Regions

Professor Porter's 1990 book, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, presents a new theory of how nations and regions compete and their sources of economic prosperity. Motivated by his appointment by President Ronald Reagan to the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the book has guided economic policy in countless nations and regions.
3. Competition and Society

Professor Porter's third major body of work has addressed the relationship between competition and important social issues such as poverty and the natural environment.
4. Health Care Delivery

Since 2001, Professor Porter has devoted considerable attention to competition in the health care system, with a focus on improving health care delivery. His work with Professor Elizabeth Teisberg, including the book Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), is influencing thinking and practice not only in the United States but numerous other countries.

Advisory and Civic Roles

Professor Porter has served as a strategy advisor to top management in numerous leading U.S. and international companies, among them Caterpillar, DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Royal Dutch Shell, Scotts Miracle-Gro, SYSCO, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.