Right this minute, in offices around the world, business-people are holding high-level meetings to talk about strategy. They’re trying to figure out if they can really achieve the lowest costs, or if they should focus on differentiating their product or try to dominate a niche in the business, and someone is suggesting they try to do a little bit of each, and someone else is replying they’d be doomed. “Should we really be doing all the activities in the value chain?” “No! We need to outsource!” The meetings are getting heated because everyone realizes the decisions could mean life or death.

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If you interrupted one of these meetings and asked the participants why they’re discussing these questions, they’d look at you funny. It’s perfectly obvious, after all, that these are the most crucial issues. We talk about them because we have to, and everyone has been talking about them since the dawn of time, they would tell you. But they would be mistaken.

Generally without knowing it, they—we—are speaking the language of Harvard’s Michael Porter, the most famous and influential business professor who has ever lived. Incredible as it seems, there was a time when these concepts were not the foundation of most business thinking. Says Roger Martin, the longtime dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business and a former colleague of Porter’s: “Everyone who talks about sustainable competitive advantage and how they’re going to get it — they don’t say, ‘This meeting is occurring because Mike Porter said it’s important.’ But that is why.”

Businesspeople aren’t the only ones who speak Porter’s language. Leaders of nations, regions, and cities use his “diamond model” to frame their plans for becoming more competitive. Environmental policymakers apply the Porter hypothesis. Health care reformers study his work on transforming that broken industry.

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Now Porter aims to change the conversation on another vast topic: America’s competitiveness. The Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project, led by Porter and professor Jan Rivkin, is unlike anything the school has attempted: recruiting scholars from inside and outside the school to achieve a specific goal — making the U.S. more competitive. “We’ve never done this before, and shame on us, frankly,” Porter says. “Look at the tremendous goodwill and influence we have. People listen, and we have to take advantage of that.” Porter takes pains to point out that dozens of people besides him are working on the project. But it’s clear that if he hadn’t agreed to be involved — to be “the tip of the spear,” as Rivkin puts it — the project might not have happened.

One of the project’s central theses is that most debates about U.S. competitiveness are wrong to focus almost entirely on federal government action. That’s why Porter and Rivkin have written this article describing how companies can make America more competitive while also advancing their own interests. In this, as in everything he does, Porter wants to exert influence: “We want every businessperson to read that article and put it down and say, ‘You know what? Damn it, we’re gonna do this!'”

You might suppose that Porter, at 65 and having exerted a career’s worth of influence, might be ready to hang it up. He isn’t. He looks 55 and has more energy than the average 35-year-old. “What I’m particularly fortunate about,” he says — he talks a lot about how lucky he has been — “is that I really love doing this stuff. I mean, I’m not tired of it. I’m not fatigued. So many academics get tired.”

In a recent typical week, he wrote during a flight back to Boston from London, met editors at the Wall Street Journal, did a video interview at the Huffington Post, and appeared on CNBC; he held several meetings or conferences at Harvard, spoke twice at a large conference of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a nonprofit he founded in 1994, and advised Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Fortune 500 CEO, and the government of Rwanda. He seems to subsist on air. Joan Magretta, a former consultant who became a Harvard Business Review editor and wrote a book called Understanding Michael Porter, says, “I’ve worked with Mike for 30 years and have never seen him eat a meal.”

A book on understanding Porter is worthwhile because he’s often misunderstood. He is widely and rightly regarded as the all-time greatest strategy guru, but that view gets the emphasis wrong. His first important book, published in 1980, was Competitive Strategy. Next came Competitive Advantage, followed by The Competitive Advantage of Nations and On Competition; there’s his Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, and of course he’s now working on the U.S. Competitiveness Project. Are you noticing a theme?

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Competition and winning have defined Porter’s work and in large part h