The Financial Times Guide to Strategy: How to Create and Deliver a Winning Strategy, Third Edition

Chapter 2. An ecological view of Corporate Strategy

Writers on Corporate Strategy generally fall into one of two competing camps. In the red corner, there is the positioning or portfolio-based approach. This says that companies should seek to be in attractive markets where the firm can establish a competitive advantage. The high priest of this movement is Harvard Professor Michael PORTER,² who believes in micro-economic analysis of the segments where competition occurs and who states bluntly that ‘Corporations don’t compete, business units do.’

In the blue corner, however, sits the resource-based view of strategy, which stresses the uniqueness of each corporation (not business unit) and claims that the success of firms is determined by the strength ...