My name is Michael E. Porter, and I am an economist, a scholar, an author, an adviser, and a teacher. My Five Forces framework for understanding the competitive forces in an industry, which I introduced in a Harvard Business Review article in 1979, started a revolution in the strategy field and continues today to shape business practices and academic thinking worldwide.
Over my career, I have written nineteen books on various topics, including economic theory and policy, competition and competitive advantage, national and state competitiveness and economic development, health-care delivery, and business strategy. American politics was literally the last topic I ever thought I’d tackle. That all changed because of Katherine Gehl.
For most of my life, I paid little attention to politics—I was too busy with policy and strategy and was working to actualize them in practice with leaders of companies and nations around the world. For me, the “game” of politics was more like noise. I assumed that developing optimal public policies was the biggest challenge. And if we could do that, good policy would be implemented based on merit. Like many of you, my primary involvement in politics was voting in elections and holding out hope for that presidential or gubernatorial candidate who could get us on the right track again. Looking back, I see now that I accepted as normal the toxic gridlock and learned helplessness our political system teaches.1
This started to change when I again turned my attention to American economic policy. In 2010, I began cochairing, with Professor Jan W. Rivkin, the U.S. Competitiveness Project, a multiyear endeavor by Harvard Business School to understand the root cause of the country’s disturbing economic performance, which began well before the Great Recession. While the United States retains great strengths, its competitiveness has been steadily declining. We face an alarming array of weaknesses that are likely familiar to you, challenges such as education, worker skills, complex regulation, and crumbling infrastructure.
The economic agenda, however, is only half of the job for government. The other half is social. In 2013 I led, with Scott Stern and other partners, the development of the Social Progress Index, a new framework and methodology for objectively measuring and comparing key social, environmental, and quality-of-life indicators in countries across the world. We discovered something most Americans don’t recognize: in the same way that our economic competitiveness has been declining, we are falling behind in many aspects of social performance, including some in areas we cherish and often pioneered. This decline in social performance has contributed to our economic challenges, too—especially inequality.
As we advanced the U.S. Competitiveness Project from diagnosis to action, my Harvard Business School colleagues and I put forward what we called the “eight-point plan,” which consisted of the most pressing policy priorities needed to revitalize our economic competitiveness. I traveled to Washington, D.C., multiple times to meet with members of Congress, and they unanimously agreed on what needed to be done.
But nothing got done. No results. How could our pathfinding policy prescriptions for reversing decades of fundamental economic decline—which was leading to cascading impacts on citizens’ opportunity and standard of living—not produce reforms? How could our plan gain bipartisan support behind closed doors but generate absolutely no legislative action in public?
I was mystified.
Katherine wasn’t. She was a veteran of high-level politics and political-change efforts. Having already gone through what she calls “the five stages of political grief,” she was the ideal pastor for my political enlightenment. Katherine already left partisan politics behind and was deeply engaged in political innovation. But our collaboration in politics started with a business challenge.
In 2013, Katherine asked me to consult on her company’s strategy. She was the president and CEO of Gehl Foods, a $250 million high-tech food manufacturing company in Wisconsin. With more than a century of innovation under its belt, the company found itself faced with precipitously declining fortunes. Katherine had been leading a turnaround effort at the company and was wrestling with how to best protect her father’s legacy and keep the company competitive for another hundred years. Little did I know that while we were using the Five Forces and other tools of competitive analysis to analyze and develop a strategy for Gehl Foods, Katherine was conducting a parallel analysis of what she came to call the politics industry.
Her epiphany is the basis of this book: the competitive-forces framework and other tools used for understanding competition in any industry could also be used to reveal the nuances of American politics. Katherine subsequently convinced me that politics was not some untouchable insider game immune to rigorous analysis. And she had the audacious idea that by demystifying politics, by looking at it as any industry, we could fix it.
Soon after Katherine sold her company in 2015—in part to dedicate more time to political innovation—she asked me to join her work as a coauthor. I was way out of my league here but was willing to give it a shot. In 2017, our report “Why Competition in the Politics Industry Is Failing America” was published by Harvard Business School and became the precursor to this book. The work was powerful and inspiring. I was hooked.
Ours is a partnership I never would have predicted. But kismet aside, origin stories have a funny way of rewriting themselves once ideas become papers, and papers become books, and books become—we hope—the basis for big change.
People often assume that I am the parent of these ideas. I am not. Katherine is the originator of both Politics Industry Theory and the strategy for political innovation we prescribe in this book. She is also the driving force in spreading and implementing these ideas around the country. I am proud to be involved.
One last thing: The Politics Industry is my twentieth book. I don’t plan for it to be my last, but after decades building a career around the strategic thinking and insights that make or break companies and nations—and influencing generations of students and helping leaders in business and government—this book might just be my most important. Why? Because it’s a book about solutions, taking action, and achieving results at a time in America when the stakes couldn’t be much higher. This book is a road map for breaking partisan gridlock and saving our democracy. As you will read, Americans have done it before.
Katherine and I will show you how we can do it again.
—Michael Porter