Hungry Start-up Strategy

PREFACE

THIS BOOK IS AN EFFORT to sate my own hunger.

Let me tell you where my hunger comes from. I’ve spent most of my career—about thirty years—in the field of business strategy. For most of that time, the work of Michael E. Porter, a business strategy guru whose work I will discuss more fully in Chapter 1, has dominated the field.

Then, in 2005, I began teaching undergraduate and MBA students at America’s leading school of entrepreneurship, Babson College. Its curriculum, probably like most around the world, pounds Porter’s ideas about strategy into students’ heads.

I discovered that when I asked students about the usefulness of Porter’s ideas for their own business, they replied with frustrated stares that signal a desire to change the subject. ...