Born 1947 · Harvard Business School economist and strategy theorist
Michael E. Porter has spent his career at Harvard Business School arguing that competition can be analysed rather than merely admired — his five forces framework and the books Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage gave managers a vocabulary they still use. By the mid-1990s he was watching that vocabulary get crowded out by management fashions, and wrote “What Is Strategy?” to insist that benchmarking and reengineering are not strategy at all. He is now the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard, though the 1996 article bylines him under an earlier chair — a detail that trips up a lot of citations.