As per Porter, different administration tools like aggregate quality administration, benchmarking, time-based rivalry, outsourcing, joining forces, reengineering, that are utilized today, do improve and drastically enhance the operational effectiveness of an organization yet neglect to give the organization sustainable profitability. Subsequently, the main driver of the issue is by all accounts disappointment of administration to recognize operational effectiveness and technique: Management instruments have taken the place of strategy.
1) Operational effectiveness is performing similar exercises superior to anything opponents perform them. Operational effectiveness incorporates however is not constrained to effectiveness. It refers to numerous practices that permit an organization to better use its inputs. Porter expresses that an organization can beat opponents just in the event that it can set up a distinction it can protect. It must convey more prominent worth to customers or make comparable value at a lower cost, or do both. Nonetheless, Porter argues that most organizations today contend on the premise of operational effectiveness.
The productivity frontier is the aggregate of all current best practices at any given time or the greatest quality that an organization can make at a given expense, utilizing the best accessible technologies, abilities, administration methods, and acquired inputs. Hence, when an organization enhances its operational effectiveness, it moves toward the frontier. The frontier is always moving outward as new advancements and administration methodologies are created and as new inputs get to be accessible. To stay aware of the persistent moves in the productivity frontier, managers have received strategies like constant change, strengthening, learning organization, and so on.
Rivalry in view of operational effectiveness alone is commonly dangerous, prompting wars of weakening that can be captured just constraining rivalry. Such rivalry can be seen in Japanese organizations, which began the worldwide upheaval in operational effectiveness in the 1970s and 1980s. Then again, now organizations (including Japanese) contending exclusively on operational effectiveness are facing consistent losses, zero-sum rivalry, static or declining costs, and weights on expenses that bargain organizations' capacity to put resources into the business for the long term.
2) Competitive strategies is about being diverse. It implies intentionally picking an alternate arrangement of exercises to convey a unique mix of value. In addition, the substance of method, as indicated by Porter, is deciding to perform exercises uniquely than rivals. Strategy is the production of an extraordinary and important position, including an alternate arrangement of exercises.
The Origins of Strategic Positions:
Strategic positions rise up out of three sources, which are not fundamentally unrelated and frequently cover.
 Variety-based positioning: Produce a subset of an industry's items or services. It is in view of the decision of item or service mixtures instead of customer segments. Subsequently, for most customers, this sort of positioning will just address a subset of their issues. It is monetarily possible just when an organization can best deliver specific items or services utilizing unique sets of activities
 Needs-based positioning: Serves most or everything the needs of a specific gathering of customers. It is in view of focusing on a segment of customers. It emerges when there are a gathering of customers with contrasting needs, and when a customized arrangement of exercises can serve those needs best.
 Access-based positioning: Segmenting customers who are available in diverse ways. Despite the fact that their needs are like those of different customers, the best design of exercises to contact them is diverse. Access can be an element of customer geography or customer scale or of anything that obliges a different set of activities to achieve customers in the most ideal way.
Whatever the basis (variety, needs, access, or some combination of the three), positioning obliges a custom-made set of activities in light of the fact that it is dependably an element of contrasts in exercises (or contrasts on the supply side). Positioning, also, is not generally an element of contrast on the demand (or customer) side. Case in point, variety and access positioning don't depend on any customer contrasts.
3) According to Porter, a sustainable advantage can't be ensured by just picking a unique position, as competitors will mimic an important position in one of the two after ways:
 A competitor can decide to reposition itself to match the predominant performer.
 A competitor can look to match the advantages of an effective position while keeping up its current position (known as straddling).
Accordingly, all together for a strategic position to be sustainable there must be trade-offs with different positions. A trade-off means that a greater amount of one thing requires less of another.
Trade- offs happen when exercises are different and emerge for three reasons:
 An organization known for delivering one sort of worth may need validity and confuse customers or undermine its own reputation by delivering another sort of quality or endeavoring to deliver two conflicting things in the meantime.
 Tradeoffs emerge from exercises themselves. Distinctive positions require diverse product configuration, distinctive equipment, distinctive employee behavior, different skills, and diverse administration systems. All in all, value is destroyed if a movement is over planned or under outlined.
 Tradeoffs emerge from breaking points on inward coordination and control. By deciding to complete in one way and not the other, administration is making its authoritative needs clear. Interestingly, organizations that attempt to be all things to all customers, frequently chance disarray amongst its workers, who then endeavor to make normal working choices without an unmistakable system.
Additionally, tradeoffs make the requirement for decision and project against repositioners and straddles. In this way, system can also be characterized as making tradeoffs in competing. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
4) Positioning decisions focus not only which activities an organization will perform and how it will individual activities additionally but also how activities identify with each other. While operational effectiveness concentrates on individual exercises, technique focuses on consolidating exercises.
Fit locks out imitators by making a chain that is as solid as its strongest connection. Fit, according to Porter, is the central segment of competitive advantage in light of the fact that discrete activities frequently influence each other.
Although fit among activities is nonexclusive and applies to numerous organizations, the most significant fit is methodology particular on the grounds that it improves a position's uniqueness and opens tradeoffs. There are three sorts of fit, which are not mutually exclusive:
 First-order fit: Simple consistency between every action (capacity) and the general methodology. Consistency guarantees that the competitive advantages of activities cumulate and don't disintegrate or counteract themselves. Further, consistency makes it simpler to convey the system to customers, workers, and shareholders, and enhances usage through resolve in the company.
 Second-order fit: Occurs when activities are reinforcing.
 Third-order fit: Goes past movement fortification to what Porter prefers to as advancement of effort. Coordination and information exchange crosswise over activities to kill excess and minimize wasted effort are the most essential sorts of exertion advancement.
In every one of the three sorts of fit, the entire matters more than any individual part. Competitive advantage stems from the exercises of the whole system. The fit among activities generously decreases cost or expands separation. In addition, as per Porter, organizations ought to think as far as topics that saturate numerous activities as opposed to indicating individual qualities, center abilities or critical resources, as qualities cut across over numerous capacities, and one quality mixes into others.