About the Authors

KATHERINE M. GEHL is a business leader, entrepreneur, author, and speaker. She is the CEO of Venn Innovations, a new organization focused on powerful and achievable change around a short list of consequential issues requiring breakthrough thinking. The first focus for Venn Innovations is American politics.

Corresponding with the release of this book, Gehl is founding the Institute for Political Innovation (IPI), a not-for-profit organization with the mission of guiding theory and practice around nonpartisan political innovation in America.

Gehl is the former president and CEO of Gehl Foods, a $250 million high-tech food manufacturing company in Wisconsin, where she led an aggressive and transformational turnaround, receiving multiple awards, before selling the company in 2015—in part to dedicate more time to political innovation. In 2013 Gehl applied the traditional tools of business analysis for the first time to politics in order to uncover the root cause of its dysfunction—the unhealthy competition in what she called the politics industry. In 2016 she invited Michael Porter to join her in her work, and they coauthored the 2017 Harvard Business School publication “Why Competition in the Politics Industry Is Failing America: A Strategy for Reinvigorating Our Democracy.” Its enthusiastic reception led to this book.

Gehl serves on the boards of Unite America, Business for America, and New America. She is the honorary cochair of the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers (NANR). In 2018 Gehl cofounded Democracy Found, an initiative dedicated to establishing Final-Five Voting in Wisconsin for congressional elections.

Gehl received a BA from the University of Notre Dame, an MA from the Catholic University of America, and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

MICHAEL E. PORTER is an economist, researcher, author, adviser, and teacher. Throughout his career at Harvard Business School, he has brought economic theory and strategy concepts to bear on many of the most challenging problems facing corporations, economies, and societies, including market competition and company strategy, economic development, the environment, and health care. Porter’s work has shaped the modern strategy field, and his ideas are taught in virtually every business school in the world. While Porter is, at his core, a scholar, his work has also achieved remarkable acceptance by practitioners in governments, corporations, and NGOs globally. He advises Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies and heads of state from around the world, and he is the most cited scholar today in economics and business.

Porter has received numerous honors, including the Adam Smith Award of the National Association for Business Economics, the John Kenneth Galbraith Medal, and—seven times—the McKinsey Award for best Harvard Business Review article of the year. He has been awarded twenty-six honorary doctorates from universities around the world, as well as the first-ever Lifetime Achievement award from the US Department of Commerce for his contribution to economic development.

In 2000 Harvard Business School and Harvard University jointly established the Institute for Strategy & Competitiveness to provide a base for Porter’s research. He was named a University Professor by Harvard University, the highest recognition that can be awarded to a Harvard faculty member.

Porter received a BSE in aerospace and mechanical engineering from Princeton University, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a PhD in business economics from Harvard University.