Best Selling Books by Michael E. Porter

The German health care system is on a collision course with budget realities. Costs are high and rising, and quality problems are becoming ever more apparent. Decades of reforms have produced little change to these troubling trends. Why has Germany failed to solve these cost and quality problems? The reason is that Germany has not set value for patients as the overarching goal, defined as the patient health outcomes achieved per euro expended. This book lays out an action agenda to move Germany to a high value system: care must be reorganized around patients and their medical conditions, providers must compete around the outcomes they achieve, health plans must take an active role in improving subscriber health, and payment must shift to models that reward excellent providers. Also, private insurance must be integrated in the risk-pooling system. These steps are practical and achievable, as numerous examples in the book demonstrate. Moving to a value-based health care system is the only way for Germany to continue to ensure access to excellent health care for everyone.

A successful firm may deter imitation by performing a system of numerous, related activities well; advantage can be sustained without game-theoretic maneuvers or reliance on a handful of valuable resources. A competitive advantage based on many activities resists imitation more effectively than an advantage that rests on few when the constituent activities are interactive. Interaction, or fit, also redoubles the imitation-deterring effects of imitation costs, limits on managerial capacity, and casual ambiguity. Complementary interactions that deter imitation can arise from technological relationships between activities or from strategic interplay between firms. A Monte Carlo simulation illustrates the main results.

"This document includes data on the performance and composition of the Hawaii economy. It is intended as an initial overview to motivate further discussions based on the full richness of data. The data is based on the Cluster Mapping Project, a multi-year effort to statistically define clusters and analyze regional economics in the United States" -- Page 3.

To further our understanding of creating and sustaining firm competitive advantage, we need to recognize two types of contextuality within firms' activity systems. First, the benefit of activity configurations can be contextual while some activityconfigurations are generically beneficial, othersgain their value only as part of particular strategies. Second, interactions among activities can be contextual. While some interactions between activities are an inherent property of the activities themselves, other interactions are determined contextually by other activity choices made by a firm. We argue that competitive advantage is likely to be more sustainable if it is based on activities that are strategy-specific and that have contextual interactions with other activities.

Le Forum Économique Mondial continue dans sa tradition d'excellence avec la 25e édition du Rapport annuel sur la Compétitivité Globale reprenant les dernières statistiques nationales et les résultats de l'Executive Opinion Survey, qui prend en compte le point de vue de plus de 8 700 leaders dans le milieu des affaires. Le Rapport expose l'évaluation la plus complète de 104 pays développés et émergents. Réalisé en collaboration avec un groupe remarquable de spécialistes internationaux et un réseau global de plus de 100 instituts de recherche nationaux et d'organisations commerciales de tout premier plan, le Rapport présente les profils détaillés et individuels de ces pays et met l'accent sur les forces et les faiblesses compétitives de chaque économie aussi bien qu'une annexe de. tableaux de données contenant les classements des pays en fonction de plus de 160 indicateurs. Le Rapport apporte également les dernières réflexions et recherches sur des problèmes d'une pertinence immédiate pour les leaders commerciaux et les décideurs politiques. Le Rapport fournit un outil de référence unique pour : les gouvernements dans l'identification des obstacles à la croissance économique et l'élaboration de meilleures politiques économiques ; le milieu des affaires dans le développement de stratégies commerciales et la prise de décisions d'investissement ; les universités dans l'analyse de l'environnement commercial actuel d'une économie et sa comparaison avec d'autres économies ; les organisations civiles afin d'en apprendre plus sur les coûts de compétitivité de leur pays par rapport aux autres.

The Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, Massachusetts is a leading center for diabetes care, clinician training, and research. The incidence of diabetes is rising precipitously worldwide, challenging quality of life with its complications and rapidly accelerating health care expenditures for employers and governments. The Joslin's multispecialty, team-based care and patient education programs provide opportunities to examine integrated practice units, early-stage and preventive care, and clinical coordination along the full care cycle. The focus on diabetes also enables discussion of what services need to be included in integrated practice units serving patients with complex, chronic diseases. However, despite its renown, the Joslin's clinical operations lose money, raising the challenge of how to align financial success and clinical success in health care delivery. The case can be used to teach strategy in health care delivery, value creation, outcome measurement, reimbursement, and strategic alliances. Learning Objective: Practical application of integrated care model, including successes achieved and challenges faced.

Although it is widely recognized that changes in technology and competition have diminished many of the traditional roles of location, this study argues for a prominent role of clusters, or geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers, and associated institutions in a particular field that compete but also cooperate. Clusters are a striking feature of virtually every national, regional, state, and even metropolitan economy, and can be seen as a new way of thinking about different level economies. Their prevalence reveals important insights about the microeconomics of competition and the role of location in competitive advantage. Clusters occur in many types of industries, in large and small economies, in rural and urban areas, and at most geographic levels. The most important reason for using clusters, rather than more traditional groupings (e.g. companies, industries, sectors), as a unit of analysis is that clusters are better aligned with the nature of competition and appropriate roles of government. They are broader than traditional industry categorizations, and thus capture important linkages, complementarities, and spillovers in terms of technology, skills, information, marketing, and customer needs that cut across firms and industries. The study argues that proximity in geographic, cultural, and institutional terms of the institutions and businesses within clusters plays an important role in allowing special access and relationships, as well as better information, powerful incentives, and other advantages in productivity that are more difficult to achieve from a distance. Clusters have three major effects on competition: 1) increasing the current (static) productivity of constituent firms or industries; 2) increasing the capacity of cluster participants for innovation and productivity growth; and 3) stimulating new business formation that supports innovation and expands the cluster. The study argues that government should focus on facilitating cluster development and upgrading, with special attention to established and emerging clusters rather than new clusters. (AT).

In this paper, we examine the emergence and the sustainability of abnormal profits among U.S. public corporations between 1981 and 1994. Our results reveal strong asymmetries between high and low performers. Overall, high performance is more stable than low performance. High performers show profits above the average a decade earlier. In contrast, low performers show profits that are slightly above average a decade earlier. Industry and corporate-parent effects influence high performance to a far greater degree than low performance. Low performance is dominated by business-specific effects.

Improving provider incentives and reimbursement must become a central component in health care reform. Reimbursement through bundled payments -- a single payment that covers all the procedures, tests, drugs, devices, and services during inpatient, outpatient, and rehabilitative care for a patient's medical condition -- is the only approach that aligns providers, payers, and suppliers in a healthy competition to increase patient value. In this article, we articulate the principles of value-based bundled payments, how such bundles should be constructed, and why we believe this reimbursement method best aligns everyone's interests around value. We describe how recent improvements in measuring outcomes and costs have overcome past barriers to wide-scale adoption of bundled payments. We conclude by describing how bundled payments can transform competition in health care, and their longer-term implications for providers, payers, employers, and patients.

In this paper we examine the importance of year, industry, corporate-parent, and business-specific effects on the profitability of U.S. public corporations within specific 4-digit SIC categories. Our results indicate that year, industry, corporate-parent, and business-specific effects account for 2%, 19%, 4%, and 32%, respectively, of the aggregate variance in profitability. We also find that the importance of the effects differs substantially across broad economic sectors. Industry effects accounts for a smaller portion of profit variance in manufacturing but a larger portion in lodging/entertainment, services, wholesale/retail trade, and transportation. Across all sectors we find negative covariance between corporate-parent and industry effects. A detailed analysis suggests that industry, corporate-parent, and business-specific effects are related in complex ways.