I just saw Harvard's Michael Porter on CNBC this morning.
Frankly, it's beyond me why they keep trotting out a guy who's clearly in his dotage. I guess name recognition, although I'm unaware of any recent work of originality or import that Porter's done in at least a decade.
And even his long-ago strategy books were derivative of SPI's research and existing data, crossed with conventional microeconomics.
However, this morning's appearance provided fresh evidence of Porter's irrelevance to today's economic debates.
Carlos whatshisname, the co-anchor on assignment in Boston today, listened raptly as Mike solemnly declared that the big economic question of the day is whether the free market approach works for everyone.
As an aside, to show how totally out of touch Porter is with America, he gratuitously stated,
'You'd be amazed at how many people in America still want to start their own business.'
No, Mike, I, and millions of other educated Americans, would not be amazed. Apparently, only you and your Harvard colleagues are amazed. Amazed that one of the two founding liberties of the nation- religion and vocation- are alive and well as aspirations even today.
Porter then went on to assert that 'we are debating' whether more free markets or more government intervention is 'the right answer' to the 'problem' that starting a business has become so burdensome and complex, thanks to, ah.....so much existing government intervention.
When asked what "the right answer is," by Carlos, Mike replied, as you'd expect, grinning,
'Well, it's really a mix of the two.'
Gee, why am I not surprised? Pick the safe middle ground.
Honestly, Porter seemed completely out of touch with the real world of American business and government regulatory interference.
Unfortunately, CNBC apparently didn't choose to interview the Harvard professor who co-wrote a provocative recent Wall Street Journal piece reporting the results of empirical research on different governmental fiscal policies. No surprise that his work found lower taxes and governmental spending were associated with higher GDP growth.
Isn't if odd- maybe amazing, to quote Porter- that the two most prominent business phenomena associated with Harvard didn't come from it's business school? I'm referring, of course, to Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard undergrad, and Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook as a Harvard undergrad.
If he's not emeritus yet, Porter probably should be now.
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3 comments:
Oh man, you've got me feeling so very conflicted today.
Just yesterday I thoroughly enjoyed your article on the "era of financial utilities" and the appalling sight of of a corporate toady like Moynihan (who's not fit to even carry Jamie Dimon's blackberry) taking the reins at BofA and spouting , and pretending to believe (I hope he's only pretending), those "retread" nostrums...he may make his predecessor look like a relative giant of finance in retrospect.
But then today I catch you jumping ugly on poor old Michael Porter. That so bummed me out.
Now, I bet you're right that he hasn't produced much that's original in the last decade (of course, your lionized Bill Gates' appropriation without attribution or compensation of others technology to get his business going suggests originality can be overrated).
But the preceding two decades of Porter's enormous contributions in corporate strategy and economic development evidence a pretty good track record. You, as a well-educated veteran of numerous corporate strategy positions, would know how extraordinarily singular has been his continuing relevance in a field plagued with faddish re-re-re-packaging and reductionist analytics (but highly attractive powerpoints !).
And somehow, you seized on the fact, that, given 45 seconds or less to respond, he refused to give a ludicrously simplistic response of your liking (Steve Murray ? Art Laffer ? Larry Kudlow ? or maybe those other guys, Robert Reich ? Paul Krugman ?) and spoke the inarguable truth that the setting of macroeconomic policy and regulatory strategy is actually more complex than the myopic buffoons on the right and left care to let on to their entranced acolytes, as a basis for dismissing Porter as merely "pick[ing] the safe ground" ?
I, too, would have been delighted to hear a couple of well-reasoned advocacy bullet-points from "the Harvard professor who co-wrote a provocative recent Wall Street Journal piece reporting the results of empirical research on different governmental fiscal policies", but, just because you were disappointed that CNBC didn't have him on yesterday and had Porter on instead, is no reason to go ballistic about Porter, who single-handedly has directed more consulting work for US businesses on corporate strategy and regulatory accomodation/manipulation than the entire Harvard Economics Department.
Anyhow, keep cranking out your stuff - it's usually spot on and delivered in a wonderful voice.
CDO-
Thanks for your extensive comment and compliments.
Allow me to be my irascible self? There are so many points in your thoughtful reflections on which to comment in reply. And I do really appreciate the time and effort you took.
First, I don't think Jamie should be allowed to use a Blackberry. He's not much better than Moynihan. I've written some posts about Dimon- he was Weill's bag carrier, and has done nothing new himself. He simply inherited the slowest-moving of the money centers (I know- I used to work there), so that Citi and BofA ran into trouble while Chase was unable to mobilize itself to follow.
Jamie simply fell into that utility CEO job. Nothing special there.
I agree with your comment on Gates- my oversight. Yes, Bill left Harvard to putter around with early computers, then did a quick shuffle to flim-flam the creator of DOS and license it to IBM. Point taken.
Now to Porter.....
I read through, but never read, any of Porter's decades-old reworks of microeconomics.
As I said to colleagues at the time, you could learn microeconomics in, well, microeconomics class. Or you could re-read it in Porter's restatements in his books.
His strategy writing wasn't all that original, either. Nothing I didn't have in, say, Industrial Organization at Penn's Graduate Business School.
I should mention that I have some inside information here. People at Strategic Planning Institute, the home of the former GE-based repository of business strategy data from thousands of business units told me that, prior to writing his books, Porter spent huge amounts of time mining the SPI database.
SPI was once affiliated with HBS. Read the seminal papers on market share, etc., co-written by my mentor and friend, Don Heany, in the 1970s.
Porter almost certainly has done more US corporate consulting work than the Harvard Econ faculty. But that probably says little.
Granted, others, since Porter's books, have re-hashed the relatively few actual categorial trusims. But that doesn't make Porter any more original.
I am okay with disagreeing with you, and others, on this point.
But, then again, the world of strategic planning, and even strategy consulting, is populated by lesser-intelligent people, poorly-educated people, and assorted charlatans. Some need Porter's books to digest basic strategy insights.
Best,
-CN
CDO-
Btw, regarding your comment on my reaction to Porter's off the cuff remarks this morning?
I will give you that he may have been surprised. And that CNBC didn't choose to have the more interesting article co-author on camera.
But if you could have seen Porter as he answered, you'd probably agree that he wasn't really 'surprised' at all. This was his standard 'split the difference' economists' response.
Never articulate a clear answer, but fuzz it up somewhere in the middle.
-CN
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