Reaction Paper to What Is Strategy? by Michael Porter

Reaction Paper to What is Strategy? By Michael Porter  

Submitted By: Kenneth Jules Brey Garol

Some concepts I encountered while reading Porter’s reference and briefly cited it to aid me to analyze his article are Operational effectiveness (OE) as the means of performing similar activities better than rivals and Strategic positioning as the means to perform activities in a different way.  He said that it promotes for lowering of cost and utilizes a superior quality of their products but suddenly doubted the unique strategic position of the companies in the industry. In somewhat contradicting manner, it basically provides a glimpse of a Trade-off concept in planning a strategy within that industry. The Productivity frontier shows a frontier curve for a maximum possible productivity on a selected process to combine series of activities that has inputs to determine a company’s relative productive position in the industry and this would also lead to practicing OE but the mere justification of it as a parallel to strategy will only be satisfied when competitors in the same industry are adapting to changes and be unique or different in terms of systems, strategies, process, advancements, reorganizations, and structure. Heterogeneous players in the market are an ideal output to promote sustainable operational effectiveness but it does not prove that it is as the same as the definition of strategy.

Nowadays, many companies are engaged in the advanced technological world market. The place where interaction takes place between buyers and sellers of a given product are up-for-grabs especially if one finds the best spot that is accessible and magnetized the customers to its entrance halls. Strategic positioning, a concept to find positions that are new or not filled by new products or knowledgeable customers and while not easily be undertaken or shut down by predators in their own market of goods and services. Managers must possess the attribute to mix technology and creativity or “thinking outside the box” and also establish their vision and organize their structure and processes to raise the market value of its products, to be attractive to their customers, to be fully-supported by their Board of Directors, and to improve the well-being of its company as a whole so that to the satisfaction of being a distinct and unique player in their own market of goods and services.  Being unique in terms of activities and methods practiced by a company is one of the keys to being strategic and also promotes an outstanding intellectual challenge to the firm and its employees sufficient enough to be consistent in providing reliable performance in the industry.

Trade-offs, like valuing a thing or a product or an event more than the other. A compromise between two products with similar features but are incompatible in nature. There is an inevitable force according to Porter about the decisions of the company’s people (managers or subordinates) that they will choose scenarios that will undermine, contrast or limit their market capacity, their products’ availability, their price offerings and their own industry channels or links to customers just to concentrate on the activities and methods of not being everything to anybody in the world.