Premiering at 10:45 a.m. ET Friday, July 29, 2022.

Katherine M. Gehl is the founder and chairman of The Institute for Political Innovation, a cross-partisan, not-for-profit organization that contributes theory, scholarship, and strategy to catalyze model, modern political change in America. Gehl joins the Chautauqua Lecture Series to close a week on “The Vote and Democracy” with a discussion of the work being done at IPI and the concept — which Gehl pioneered — of Final-Five Voting, a combination of single ballot, top-five primaries and instant runoff general elections. 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 Harvard Business School Professor Michael E. Porter to join her in her work; they co-authored the 2017 Harvard Business School publication “Why Competition in the Politics Industry Is Failing America: A Strategy for Reinvigorating Our Democracy," which led to their book The Politics Industry. Gehl serves on the boards of Unite America, Business for America, and New America. She is the honorary co-chair of the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers. In 2018 Gehl cofounded Democracy Found, an initiative dedicated to establishing Final-Five Voting in Wisconsin for congressional elections. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Notre Dame, her master’s from the Catholic University of America, and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.