Michael Porter

During April 2014, Porter discussed how the United States ranks relative to other countries on a comprehensive scorecard called "The Social Progress Index", an effort which he co-authored. This scorecard rated the U.S. on a comprehensive set of metrics; overall, the U.S. placed 16th.

Porter stated in a 2010 interview: "What I've come to see as probably my greatest gift is the ability to take an extraordinarily complex, integrated, multidimensional problem and get arms around it conceptually in a way that helps, that informs and empowers practitioners to actually do things."

In addition to his research, writing, and teaching, Porter serves as an advisor to business, government, and the social sector. He has served as strategy advisor to numerous leading U.S. and international companies, including Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Royal Dutch Shell, and Taiwan Semiconductor. Professor Porter once served on two public boards of directors, those of Thermo Fisher Scientific and Parametric Technology Corporation. He also plays an active role in U.S. economic policy, working with the Executive Branch and with Congress, and has led national economic-strategy programs in numerous countries. As of 2009 he was working with the presidents of Rwanda and South Korea.

Porter has devoted considerable attention to understanding and addressing the pressing problems in health care delivery in the United States and other countries. His book, Redefining Health Care (written with Elizabeth Teisberg), develops a new strategic framework for transforming the value delivered by the health care system, with implications for providers, health plans, employers, and government, among other actors. The book received the James A. Hamilton award of the American College of Healthcare Executives in 2007 for book of the year. His New England Journal of Medicine research article, "A Strategy for Health Care Reform – Toward a Value-Based System" (July 2009), lays out a health reform strategy for the U.S. His work on health care is being extended to address the problems of health care delivery in developing countries, in collaboration with Dr. Jim Yong Kim, Sachin H. Jain, and others at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health.

In 2000, Michael Porter was appointed Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard, the university's highest recognition awarded to Harvard faculty.

Michael Porter has founded four major non-profit organizations: Initiative for a Competitive Inner City – ICIC, founded in 1994, and which he still chairs, which addresses economic development in distressed urban communities; the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which creates rigorous tools for measuring foundation effectiveness; FSG Social Impact Advisors, a leading non-profit strategy firm which he co-founded with Mark Kramer, serving NGOs, corporations, and foundations in the area of creating social value; and International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurements (ICHOM), which he co-founded in 2012 with Stefan Larsson and Martin Ingvar. ICHOM supports the key strategic agenda items in Porter's Value-Based Health Care Delivery framework by working with patients and leading healthcare providers to create a global standard for measuring health outcomes. He also currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Princeton University.

Porter wrote "The Competitive Advantage of Nations" in 1990. The book is based on studies of ten nations and argues that a key to national wealth and advantage was the productivity of firms and workers collectively, and that the national and regional environment supports that productivity. He proposed the "diamond" framework, a mutually-reinforcing system of four factors that determine national advantage: factor conditions; demand conditions; related or supporting industries; and firm strategy, structure and rivalry. Information, incentives, and infrastructure were also key to that productivity.

Porter introduced the concept of competitive advantage in 1985 which later went onto become one of the key concepts in management science at present. He also published a book titled Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance in order to explain the concept of competitive advantage and the book which later went onto become a bestseller also focuses on value chain concept.

In 1983, Michael Porter co-founded the Monitor Group, a strategy-consulting firm. Deloitte Consulting acquired the Monitor Group in 2013 through a structured bankruptcy proceeding.

Michael Porter defined the two ways in which an organization can achieve competitive advantage over its rivals: cost advantage and differentiation advantage. Cost advantage is when a business provides the same products and services as its competitors, albeit at a lesser cost. Differentiation advantage is when a business provides better products and services as its competitors. In Porter's view, strategic management should be concerned with building and sustaining competitive advantage. He originally developed the Porter's Five Forces in 1979 which is still widely used as a model to analyse the industry and to estimate whether it would be profitable and ideal enough to enter the industry after carefully examining the bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of new entrants, competition among existing firms and threat of substitutes. He first wrote and published about Porter's Five Forces in a 1979 article How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy and has further explained about the Five Forces in his 1980 article Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors.

Michael Porter's father was a civil engineer and Georgia Tech graduate who had gone on to a career as an army officer. Michael Eugene Porter received a BSE with high honors in aerospace and mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, where he graduated first in his class and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He received an MBA with high distinction in 1971 from Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar, and a PhD in business economics from Harvard University in 1973.

Michael Eugene Porter (born May 23, 1947) is an American academic known for his theories on economics, business strategy, and social causes. He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, and he was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte) and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited for creating Porter's five forces analysis, which is instrumental in business strategy development at present. He is generally regarded and hailed as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists the world has ever seen. He is the most sought after research scholar and his work has been highly recognised by governments, non governmental organisations and universities.