Aligning Strategy & Project Management

About this video

Michael Porter is the world-renowned Harvard Business School professor and pioneering strategist whose frameworks on competitive advantage, the five forces, and value chains have shaped how leaders think about business strategy for decades.

Stop trying to be the “best” business in your category. A stronger strategy is to decide which customers you will serve unusually well, what value you will deliver to them, and what you are deliberately willing not to offer. For an SME with limited capital and management bandwidth, strategic discipline matters as much as execution: every new product, channel, technology investment, and customer request should reinforce the position you have chosen.

Full Video at the end of page

Core Insight (Plain English)

Being better at everything is not a strategy. Being meaningfully different for a chosen customer can be.

Good operations keep you competitive. Strategy determines where and how you choose to compete.

That requires choices: which customers matter most, which needs you will prioritise, whether your advantage comes from higher perceived value or lower cost, and—critically—what you will not do. If you copy every competitor improvement and satisfy every customer request, you may become more capable without becoming more distinctive.

7 Practical Lessons

• Define your target customer more narrowly. “Everyone who could buy from us” is rarely useful. Identify the customers whose needs fit what your business can deliver distinctively, then design around them.

• Separate strategy from goals. “Become market leader,” “grow 30%,” or “expand into Indonesia” are outcomes or actions, not strategies. Ask what combination of choices will actually create the advantage required to achieve them.

• Treat best practice as table stakes, not differentiation. Adopt useful technology, improve processes, automate and reduce waste—but assume competitors can eventually do the same. Cloud software, AI tools or a new CRM may improve your SME without giving it a durable strategic advantage.

• Trace your advantage back to actual activities. Ask where customers' willingness to pay—or your cost advantage—really comes from: sourcing, product design, logistics, sales, service, distribution or something else. Then invest disproportionately in those activities.

• Get comfortable saying no. Some customer requests should remain unmet. Customisation, additional service, another SKU or another sales channel can look like incremental revenue while gradually destroying the operating model that made you competitive.

• Diagnose whether the problem is your company or the market. Weak performance can come from poor positioning, but it can also come from unattractive industry economics—powerful buyers, strong suppliers, substitutes, new entrants or intense rivalry. Those require different responses.

• Make projects prove their strategic fit. Before approving a new system, product, outlet or expansion project, ask: What part of our competitive position does this strengthen? If nobody can answer clearly, reconsider the investment.

Summary & Reflections

The framework is particularly useful for SMEs because limited resources make indiscriminate expansion expensive. The warning against trying to please every customer is important: additional products, services and exceptions can quietly increase complexity faster than revenue.

But strategic consistency should not become rigidity. The transcript stresses continuity and warns against constantly changing position, while also acknowledging that major changes can require strategy to change. An SME in a rapidly evolving market may therefore need to distinguish between protecting its core positioning and stubbornly preserving assumptions that customers, technology or industry economics have already invalidated.

Regional Consideration — Southeast Asia
Market fragmentation makes the choices harder. A positioning that works in Singapore may not transfer unchanged to Indonesia, Vietnam or Thailand because customer purchasing power, channels and operating conditions can differ. Regional expansion should therefore test whether the underlying value proposition travels—not assume that geographic expansion itself is a strategy.

Who should watch the full video

Best suited to SME founders, business owners, general managers, strategy leads, product leaders and project/program managers who are making decisions about growth, positioning, investment priorities or expansion.

It is especially worthwhile if your company has many initiatives underway but struggles to explain clearly why those particular initiatives should make the business more competitive.

Decision Rating

Decision Usefulness — ★★★★★
Highly useful for operators because it provides a clear filter for customer selection, investments, projects and competitive decisions. The distinction between goals, operational improvement and actual strategy is particularly practical.

Strategic Value — ★★★★★
The framework addresses foundational choices: where to compete, how to differentiate, what activities create advantage and what not to pursue. These principles can materially change how an SME allocates scarce resources.

Practical Applicability — ★★★★☆
The concepts translate well into management decisions, particularly customer targeting, project prioritisation and trade-offs. Execution is harder than the framework makes it appear, however: identifying a genuinely defensible position requires strong customer and industry understanding, not simply choosing to be different.

Until next time,
The SME Signal editorial Team

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