[6] Michael Porter's father was a civil engineer and Georgia Tech graduate who had also gone on to a career as an army officer.

Porter credits Harvard professor Roland "Chris" Christensen with inspiring him and encouraging him to speak up during class.

[13] During April 2014, Porter discussed how the US ranks relative to other countries on a comprehensive scorecard called "The Social Progress Index", an effort which he co-authored.

[16] He originally developed the Porter's Five Forces in 1979 which is still widely used as a model to analyse the industry and to estimate whether it would be profitable and ideal enough to enter the industry after carefully examining the bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of new entrants, competition among existing firms and threat of substitutes.

[20] Porter introduced the concept of value chain analysis in his 1985 book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

He has been a strategy advisor to US and international companies, including Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble,[23] Scotts Miracle-Gro, Royal Dutch Shell, and Taiwan Semiconductor.

[citation needed] Porter has served on two public boards of directors, those of Thermo Fisher Scientific and Parametric Technology Corporation.

[citation needed] He influence economic policy, working with the Executive Branch and with Congress, and has led national economic-strategy programs in other countries.

[citation needed] In 1983, Porter co-founded the Monitor Group, a strategy-consulting firm acquired by Deloitte Consulting in 2013 through a structured bankruptcy proceeding.

[24] Michael Porter has founded four major non-profit organizations: Initiative for a Competitive Inner City – ICIC, founded in 1994,[25] and which he still chairs,[26] which addresses economic development in distressed urban communities; the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which creates rigorous tools for measuring foundation effectiveness; FSG Social Impact Advisors, a leading non-profit strategy firm which he co-founded with Mark Kramer,[27] serving NGOs, corporations, and foundations in the area of creating social value; and International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurements (ICHOM), which he co-founded in 2012 with Stefan Larsson and Martin Ingvar.

[citation needed] An analysis by Porter in collaboration with Katherine Gehl frames the US two-party system as a duopoly, a business best described as a "political industry", that competes in ways that serve the parties' interests rather than the public good.

[citation needed] Porter stated in a 2010 interview: "What I've come to see as probably my greatest gift is the ability to take an extraordinarily complex, integrated, multidimensional problem and get arms around it conceptually in a way that helps, that informs and empowers practitioners to actually do things.