Leadership Quote by Michael Porter

Porter’s line lands like a reprimand aimed at the modern managerial reflex: when results wobble, rebrand the plan. “Finally” signals he’s closing a case, not offering a fresh brainstorm. Strategy, in his frame, isn’t a mood board or a quarterly slogan; it’s a disciplined set of choices that only becomes legible over time. Continuity is the hidden ingredient that makes any strategic claim testable. Without it, you can’t tell whether a decision worked, whether the market changed, or whether leadership simply panicked.

The subtext is also a shot at the cult of agility. Porter isn’t anti-change; he’s anti-whiplash. Constant reinvention often masquerades as responsiveness but functions as evasion, a way to avoid the political pain of trade-offs. If your “strategy” changes every year, you never have to admit you chose the wrong customers, underinvested in capabilities, or promised everything to everyone. Reinvention becomes a performance of decisiveness.

Context matters: Porter built a career arguing that competitive advantage comes from coherence across activities - fit, focus, and the willingness to be different. That coherence can’t be assembled in a sprint; it’s built through accumulated investments, habits, and constraints. Continuity is what turns strategy into an ecosystem rather than a PowerPoint.

Read this as a warning to leaders in volatile markets: adapt tactics fast, yes. But if you keep rewriting the story, you’re not steering the company - you’re just keeping it too dizzy to notice it has no direction.