Monday, April 11, 2011

Warsh Smacks Michael Porter, Again

David Warsh takes another swipe at Michael Porter:

Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which in 2007 had trumpeted the Porter project, followed up last week with a pithy survey of the situation (“Flattery for hire has no place on the CV of a serious academic”).

The really interesting questions have to do with channels of influence. Heretofore stories have tended to blame Monitor, the Cambridge, Mass., consulting group founded by Porter and seven other Harvard Business School professors. The reputations of Joseph Nye and Robert Putnam, both former deans of Harvard’s Kennedy School, and political scientist Benjamin Barber, have been bruised.

But it was Porter’s personal project from the beginning. It was he who somewhat breathlessly broke the news of his engagement in the Financial Times, in 2006, which reported it on its front page. ”I have gotten to know Saif quite well,” he explained the next year to BusinessWeek, referring to the dictator’s son. “He was a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics, where he studied with some of the best professors. He’s very much oriented towards making Libya a member of the modern world community.”

That was shortly before Porter says he ended his involvement, after he learned that the wrong man was put in charge of the project he had devised. But Monitor continued to collect.

And a year after Porter quit, the Libyan dictator’s reincarnation as “a mainstream, more responsible member of the world community” was intact. The FT noted in an advertising supplement “the procession of world leaders to Gadhafi’s door” (but not that many of the stream of visitors had been paid by Monitor).

Moreover, this time the FT didn’t consult Porter. He appeared in the story only as another button on Gadhafi’s sleeve, “the Harvard management guru… once an adviser to Ronald Reagan as U.S. president, [who] helped to produce a 200 page document that called for prioritizing tourism, agriculture and construction to diversify an economy in which oil and gas account for 70 percent of gross domestic product.”

Say this then for Michael Porter. When he’s bought, he stays bought. He has had a remarkable career as a master explicator of industrial strategies, a consultant to corporations and governments alike. What he thought there was to gain from becoming public-relations councilor to a madman and his son remains a real mystery.

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