迈克尔 波特在哈佛商业评论上发表的一篇关于战略的经典文章.docx

1、迈克尔 波特在哈佛商业评论上发表的一篇关于战略的经典文章What Is Strategy? Contents I. Operational Effectiveness Is Not Strategy For almost two decades, managers have been learning to play by a new set of rules. Companies must be flexible to respond rapidlyto competitive and market changes. They must benchmarkcontinuously to ac

2、hieve best practice. They must outsourceaggressively to gain efficiencies. And they must nutture a few corecompetencies in the race to stay ahead of rivals.Positioning-once the heart of strategy-is rejected as too static fortodays dynamic markets and changing technologies. According tothe new dogma,

3、 rivals can quickly copy any market position, andcompetitive advantage is, at best, temporary.But those beliefs are dangerous half-truths, and they are leadingmore and more companies down the path of mutually destructivecompetition. True, some barriers to competition are falling asregulation eases a

4、nd markets become global. True, companieshave properly invested energy in becoming leaner and morenimble. In many industries, however, what some callhypercompetition is a self-inflicted wound, not the inevitableoutcome of a changing paradigm of competition.The root of the problem is the failure to d

5、istinguish betweenoperational effectiveness and strat egy. The quest for productivity,quality, and speed has spawned a remarkable number ofmanagement tools and techniques: total quality management,benchmarking, time-based competition, outsourcing, partnering,reengineering, change management. Althoug

6、h the resultingoperational improvements have often been dramatic, manycompanies have been frustrated by their inability to translate those Choosegains into sustainable profitability. And bit by bit, almost imperceptibly, management tools have taken the place of strategy. As managers push to improve

7、on all fronts, they move farther away from viable competitive positions. Operational effectiveness and strategy are both essential to superior performance, which, after all, is the primary goal of any enterprise. But they work in very different ways.A company can outperform rivals only if it can est

8、ablish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both. The arithmetic of superior profitability then follows: delivering greater,value allows a company to charge higher average unit prices; greater efficiency resul

9、ts in lower average unit costs.Ultimately, all differences between companies in cost or price derive from the hundreds of activities required to create, produce, sell, and deliver their products or services, such as calling on customers, assembling final products, and training employees. Cost isgene

10、rated by performing activities, and cost advantage arises from performing particular activities more efficiently than competitors. Similarly, differentiation arises from both the choice of activities and how they are performed. Activities, then, are the basic units of competitive advantage. Overall

11、advantage or disadvantage results from all a companys activities, not only a few.Operational effectiveness fOE) means performing similar activities better than rivals perform them. Operational effectiveness includes but is not limited to efficiency. It refers to any number of practices that allow a

12、company to better utilize its inputs by, for example, reducing defects in products or developing better products faster. In contrast, strategic positioning means performing different activities from rivals or performing similar activities in different ways.GRAPH: Operational Effectiveness Versus Str

13、ategic PositioningDifferences in operational effectiveness among companies are pervasive. Somecompanies are able to get more out of their inputs than others because they eliminate wasted effort, employ more advanced technology, motivate employees better, or have greater insight into managing particu

14、lar activities or sets of activities. Such differences in operational effectiveness are an important source of differences in profitability among competitors because they directly affect relative cost positions and levels ofdifferentiation.Differences in operational effectiveness were at the heart o

15、f the Japanese challenge to Western companies in the 1980s. The Japanese were so far ahead of rivals in operational effectiveness that they could offer lower cost and superior quality at the same time. It is worth dwelling on this point, because so much recent thinking about competition depends on i

16、t. Imagine for a moment a productivity frontier that constitutes the sum of all existing best practices at any given time. Think of it as the maximum value that a company delivering a particular product or service can create at a given cost, using the best available technologies, skills, management

17、techniques, and purchased inputs. Theproductivity frontier can apply to individual activities, to groups of linked activities such as order processing and manufacturing, and to an entire companys activities. When a company improves its operational effectiveness, it moves toward the frontier. Doing s

18、o may require capital investment, different personnel, or simply new ways of managing. The productivity frontier is constantly shifting outward as new technologies andmanagement approaches are developed and as new inputs become available. Laptop computers, mobile communications, the Internet, and so

19、ftware such as Lotus Notes, for example, have redefined the productivity frontier for sales-force operations and created rich possibilities for linking sales with such activities as order processing and after-salessupport. Similarly, lean production, which involves a family of activities, has allowe

20、d substantial improvements in manufacturing productivity and asset utilization.For at least the past decade, managers have been preoccupied with improvingoperational effectiveness. Through programs such as TQM, time-based competition, and benchmarking, they have changed how they perform activities i

21、n order to eliminateinefficiencies, improve customer satisfaction, and achieve, best practice. Hoping to keep up with shifts in the productivity frontier, managers have embraced continuous improvement, empowerment, change management, and the so-called learningorganization. The popularity of outsourc

22、ing and the virtual corporation reflect the growing recognition that it is difficult to perform all activities as productively as specialists. As companies move to the frontier, they can often improve on multiple dimensions of performance at the same time. For example, manufacturers that adopted the

23、 Japanese practice of rapid changeovers in the 1980s were able to lower cost and improvedifferentiation simultaneously. What were once believed to be real trade-offs- between defects and costs, for example- turned out to be illusions created by poor operational effectiveness. Managers have learned t

24、o reject such false trade-offs.Constant improvement in operational effectiveness is necessary to achieve superior profitability. However, it is not usually sufficient. Few companies have competed successfully on the basis of operational effectiveness over an extended period, and staying ahead of riv

25、als gets harder every day. The most obvious reason for that is the rapid diffusion of best practices. Competitors can quickly imitate management techniques, new technologies, input improvements, and superior ways of meeting customers needs. The most generic solutions- those that can be used in multi

26、ple settings- diffuse the fastest. Witness the proliferation of OE techniques accelerated by support from consultants.OE competition shifts the productivity frontier outward, effectively raising the bar foreveryone. But although such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effective

27、ness, it leads to relative improvement for no one. Consider the $5 billion-plus U.S. commercial-printing industry. The major players- R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Quebecor, World Color Press, and Big Flower Press-are competing head to head, serving all types of customers, offering the same arr

28、ay of printing technologies (gravure and web offset), investing heavily in the same new equipment, running their presses faster, and reducing crew sizes. But the resulting major productivity gains are being captured by customers and equipment suppliers, not retained in superior profitability. Evenin

29、dustry-leader Donnelleys profit margin, consistently higher than 7% in the 1980s, fell to less than 4.6% in 1995. This pattern is playing itself out in industry after industry. Even the Japanese, pioneers of the new competition, suffer from persistently low profits. (See the insert "Japanese Co

30、mpanies Rarely Have Strategies.")The second reason that improved operational effectiveness is insufficient- competitiveconvergence- is more subtle and insidious. The more benchmarking companies do, the more they look alike. The more that rivals outsource activities to efficient third parties, o

31、ften the same ones, the more generic those activities become. As rivals imitate one anothers improvements in quality, cycle times, or supplier partnerships, strategies converge and competition becomes a series of races down identical paths that no one can win. Competition based on operational effect

32、iveness alone is mutually destructive, leading to wars of attrition that can be arrested only by limiting competition.The recent wave of industry consolidation through mergers makes sense in the context of OE competition. Driven by performance pressures but lacking strategic vision, company after company has had no better idea than to buy up its rivals. The competitors left standing are often those that outlasted others, not companies with real advantage. After a decade of impressive gains in operational effectiveness, many companies are facing diminishing returns. Continuous