Pillar #10 of my “Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom” is:

Competition is a hardy weed, not a delicate flower.

I thought of that when I read Steven Denning’s recent article on the recent bankruptcy of Monitor. It’s titled, “What Killed Michael Porter’s Monitor Group? The One Force That Really Matters.” The most-relevant paragraph:

There was just one snag. What was the intellectual basis of this now vast enterprise of locating sustainable competitive advantage? As Stewart notes, it was “lacking any foundation in fact or logic.” Except where generated by government regulation, sustainable competitive advantage simply doesn’t exist.

I have a close-to-personal interest in Monitor, by the way. When Monitor went bankrupt last month, one of my closest friends, a retired Monitor employee, lost one third of his net worth. I’m amazed at, and proud of, how clearly my friend is thinking and acting and how little he is playing “ain’t it awful?”