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2/7/2005
More on Michael Porter: A Personal Recollection by Professor Ross Miller

It is safe to say that Bruce Henderson's infamous Cash Cow/Star method at BCG (1976) predated Porter's Competitive Strategy (1980). I attended one of Henderson's lecture at HBS in 1977 and his system was fully in place back then while Porter was sweating (literally, with big armpit stains) over in the econ department teaching industrial organization. GE's operative strategy under Welch was a variant of the BCG's matrix (Be first, be second, or be gone) and Porter/Monitor (his consulting firm) were quickly deemed persona non grata (kindly refrain from contacting us) at GE.

I view Porter's work as a clever repackaging/dumbing down of the industrial organization theory developed by his mentors in the Harvard econ department (Richard Caves and Michael Spence) for the business world. The concepts that Porter supposed pioneered, especially barriers to entry, were well established in the industrial organization literature long before Porter came along.

Having sat in on several of Porter's industrial organization classes (fortunately, I got to take the course for credit from Richard Caves while he was still teaching it), I can vouch for the fact that Porter does indeed have a reasonable grasp of microeconomics and understands basic statistics. If this does not come through in his written work, it is either by choice or the result of faulty memory.