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This chapter is excerpted from ‘Understanding the Dynamics of the Value Chain'. The year was 1985. Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School published his business best-selling book, Competitive Advantage. It was touted at the time as 'the most influential management book of the past quarter century.' In that book, Porter introduced the concept of the value chain, described as 'a systematic way of examining all activities a firm performs and how they interact, (necessary) for analyzing the sources of competitive advantage.' Looking back, the most significant and lasting contribution of Porter's value chain was the notion of interrelationships among a firm's many activities. It is the idea of 'linkages,' as he called them, which was the real breakthrough in management thinking. The linkages could be either horizontal among the activities inside the firm or vertical with constituents outside the firm including suppliers and customers. It was the firm and its outside constituencies and their respective value chains that formed what he called the value system in which all organizations operate. Thinking of a firm as a series of horizontal and vertical linkages forced from out of the shadows the silo mentality within which firms operated and how business schools structured curriculum. That mentality caused all manners of organizational dysfunctions, including turf protection, anathema to the effective management of the value chain. The silo mentality also caused business schools to graduate students unable to see the firm as a holistic entity, an understanding of how all of its parts fit together to develop competitive advantage. Students were accounting majors, marketing majors, finance majors, and so forth, with little exposure to the importance of cross-discipline integration save for a strategic management course that most schools offer in the senior undergraduate year or as an MBA capstone. Students graduating with a silo mentality perpetuated the silo mentality in business firms. Unfortunately, that silo mentality continues to be all too common in businesses and in business schools. Despite the need to help business professionals and students develop the holistic thinking critical to competing in the global economy, there are few comprehensive resources available from which they can draw. The purpose of this book is to help fill that void. Fundamental to holistic thinking is a shift of mind, 'metanoia' as Peter Senge called it in his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline. This book is designed to draw together existing knowledge to help facilitate the shift of mind necessary to effectively manage the value chain. It introduces a new conception of the value chain, one that has been copyrighted (2006) and improves on Porter's groundbreading 1985 work, providing a new perspective of the value chain commensurate with the demands of the 21st-century global economy. The Porter model has not been updated since its introduction in 1985, yet continues to be used in current textbooks presenting the concept of the value chain.