between success and failure. The following excerpt from Fortune says it best.For Porter, much of what has passed for management thinking in the past decade may have been important, but it wasn't strategy--and isn't nearly as crucial as good strategy. "Strategy is not accidental. It is a purposeful process," he says. "Luck is alive and well. Intuition is alive and well. But human beings have some control over their own destiny. And you can improve your odds of making better judgments." (Surowiecki, 1999)Porter's skepticism about the idea that strategy is less important today than it once was is mirrored by his skepticism about the idea that the Internet will turn the business world upside down. "The arrival of the Internet will affect every industry in some way, but for 50% or more of the economy it's not a transformational event," he says. "It will have a powerful impact on the supply of information to customers and the relationship between companies and their suppliers, but it's not like the automobile. You don't have to change the theory of strategy to deal with the Internet." (Surowiecki, 1999)Porter points to the dominant players in the New Economy as classic exemplars of successful strategic thinking. "The average technology company is not all that gifted in terms of strategy," Porter says. "But the most successful companies--the Dells, the Intels, the Ciscos--don't think about strategy as incremental or impossible. They have a clear sense of what they're trying to do and of how to do it." (Surowiecki, 1999) ...
