HARVARD’S MICHAEL PORTER HONORED
BY ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT

BOSTON, Aug. 5, 2003 -- Professor Michael E. Porter, one of the world’s leading authorities on competitive strategy and international competitiveness, received the 2003 Scholarly Contributions to Management Award today in Seattle during the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, a professional association for scholars from around the world who are dedicated to creating and disseminating knowledge about management and organizations. Based at Harvard Business School, where he leads the Institute for Competitiveness and Strategy, Porter holds the Bishop William Lawrence University Professorship at Harvard.

With this annual award, the Academy recognizes significant scholarly contributions that have substantially affected management knowledge and practice.  Past winners include Herbert Simon, Alfred Chandler, and Chris Argyris.

Porter’s work examines three areas: how firms compete in industries and gain competitive advantage; the sources of competitiveness and prosperity of nations, states, cities, and regions; and how competitive thinking can be applied to social issues such as the environment, philanthropy and economically distressed communities.

“From the start, my goal has been to integrate thinking about the economic theory of competition and national development with a deep understanding of companies and business strategy,” Porter has stated.  “These fields had never really intersected before. In addition to scholars, I have sought to reach practitioners in business and government, offering them systematic frameworks for developing strategy for companies, regions and countries.”

Among Porter’s 16 books and more than 100 articles are such seminal works as Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (1980), Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (1985), and The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990).  He has won five McKinsey Awards honoring the best articles of the year in the Harvard Business Review, most recently for “The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy” (2002) and “Strategy and the Internet” (2001).

Porter has also served as a counselor on competitive strategy to many leading U.S. and international companies and helped government leaders in many countries to develop national economic strategies.

A graduate of Princeton University, Porter earned an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School in 1971 and a Ph.D. in business economics from Harvard University in 1973.

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