The Golden Passport

arrogance is one of the coefficients of money.

pathway to sustainable long-term results is not to “manage by results” but to “manage by means”—to manage the concrete human activities from which financial results only emanate.

fallacy of misplaced concreteness”

One interesting result is that none of the faculty bothers to claim to understand (or research) the firm as a whole.

In time, this teaching contributed to the modern obsession in business with ‘looking good’ by the numbers,” he writes, “no matter what damage [it] does to the underlying system of relationships that sustain any human organization.”

it always gets complicated at the intersection of profit maximization and sound judgment.

Porter’s view of strategy is analytic and reductive in nature, whereas true insight comes through synthesis.

Subsequent studies have also shown that company-specific characteristics, not industry-specific ones, are more powerful determinants of sustainable excess profits.

For decades, McKinsey & Company suffered from a similar emphasis on the former to the exclusion of the latter—on thinking as opposed to doing.

Michael Porter took IO, turned it upside down, and called it strategy.