The Competitive Strategy: Techniques For Analyzing Industries And Competitors is an informative and comprehensive book that delves into the theory, practise, and teaching of business strategies all over the world. Simple yet impactful, the author analyses the complexities of the industrial world, and its cutthroat competition in five underlying forces. These forces are the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of customers and that of suppliers, the imminent threat of substitute products or services and the intensity of competitive rivalry.

The author asserts that thinking about a company’s competitive strategy explicitly is crucial, because it aligns the individual functional departments of the organisation, to a set of common goals and objectives. So, a framework is created for analysing the industry and predicting its evolution in the future. The author also introduces three strategies which account for powerful competitive tools - differentiation, lowest cost, and focus.

The text in this book is segregated into three parts, the first evaluates a general analytical framework in order to correctly analyse the structure of an industry and its competitors. The second part is dedicated to implementing this framework to a wide array of industries and environments.