Politics & Power Quote by Henry Kravis

"Take a few companies" sounds like modest tinkering, the sort of civic-minded pilot program you’d pitch at a conference. Coming from Henry Kravis, it’s a power phrase disguised as a public-service announcement. He isn’t talking about case studies; he’s talking about control. In the private-equity world Kravis helped define, you don’t “use” companies as models without first remaking them: new incentives, new leadership, new cost structures, often new debt. The subtext is bluntly missionary: pick targets, engineer outcomes, then hold them up as proof that the rest of corporate America is lazy, bloated, or sentimental.

The rhetoric is calibrated to soothe two audiences at once. For skeptics, it frames buyouts as a competitiveness project, not extraction. For CEOs and boards, it dangles a flattering premise: you can be “more competitive” if you submit to the discipline of finance and measurement. “Competitive” is doing the heavy lifting here, a word that smuggles in layoffs, plant closures, and aggressive restructuring as if they’re just the price of staying in the race.

Context matters: Kravis rose during an era when shareholder primacy hardened into common sense and when Wall Street’s argument was essentially, “We’re not raiders, we’re reformers.” This line continues that tradition. It’s less about helping corporate America than about legitimizing a particular model of corporate governance: management by leverage, urgency by deadline, virtue by returns. In that sense, the “examples” aren’t lessons; they’re warnings.