Week 6 Reading Reflection

            Porter’s five forces represent an excellent piece of comprehensive approach to business strategy. I believe what Porter has brought is a pioneering approach is taking into account the buyer’s power of bargaining, before it actually became an obviously important factor with advent of giant online retailers like Ebay and Amazon and their customer review feature. All the five forces are the broken down in smaller, easy to understand and to also quantify to some extent, giving any strategist of a company a way to divide and conquer a task that’s rather complicated and hard to structure the work for. To me an important lesson from this reading is that there is different life stages of any company and depending on where you stand you must be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and then be aware when you the power to turn the tables around to advance your goals based on your earned advanced position with regard to your suppliers, competitors, substitute products and potential entrants. What I would like to ask the author is, if you are in an industry that is not so obviously positioned with regard to all forces, how would you go about finding where exactly do you stand, or at least where do you approximately stand?