Press

50-word bio

Michael Christopher Warren is a builder and author in New York. He founded StatecraftCRM, an operating system purpose-built for government affairs, and RegulatorIndex, a directory of utility regulators in all 50 states. He is the author of How Power Actually Moves: A Government Affairs Function That Outlasts Its People.

150-word bio

Michael Christopher Warren is a builder and author in New York. He studies how institutions actually work, then builds what they are missing.

He started in communication and media, with early work at MTV Networks and Fox Television, then spent twelve years founding and running his own businesses. Government and external affairs at Pepco and Exelon followed. Inside regulated utilities he saw how much of an institution's judgment lives in individual people, and how much leaves when they do.

He is the founder of StatecraftCRM, an operating system purpose-built for government affairs; RegulatorIndex, a directory of utility regulators in all 50 states; and Unborrowed, a firm that builds the platforms accomplished people own. His book, How Power Actually Moves: A Government Affairs Function That Outlasts Its People, examines how institutions see, map, move and remember, and why the ones that preserve what they learn become more capable over time.

400-word bio

Michael Christopher Warren is a builder and author in New York. His work begins with a plain observation about institutions: much of what they know is held by individual people rather than by the institution itself, and when those people leave, the institution often discovers how little it kept.

He came to that observation by an unusual route. His father taught him that business was about thirty percent technical and seventy percent communication, and when Warren chose a course of study at Temple University, the conventional business majors looked like separate functions of a company. Strategic Communication looked like business itself. He took a Bachelor of Arts in Strategic Communication, and early work in media included MTV Networks and Fox Television, where communication stopped being an academic subject and became something he watched operate in real time.

He then spent twelve years building businesses of his own. He founded Body Makeover Fitness in 2010 and CRAG Fitness in 2016, running CRAG until 2022. Those years made him an operator long before he began building software: selling, delivering, keeping promises and living with the consequences of decisions.

Government and external affairs at Pepco and Exelon brought him inside large regulated institutions, where decisions depend on regulators, officials and communities as much as on anything inside the company. There he saw the pattern that now shapes his work. Relationships, commitments and judgment lived mostly in people, and institutions treated the excellence of individuals as if it were capability of their own.

Warren now builds what that pattern leaves missing. He is the founder of StatecraftCRM, an operating system purpose-built for government affairs that keeps commitments, history and context from leaving with the people who hold them; RegulatorIndex, a free public directory of U.S. state utility commissions and commissioners; and Unborrowed, a firm that builds the digital platforms accomplished people and organizations own. RegulatorIndex also publishes PUC Watch, a briefing on developments across state utility regulation.

He is the author of How Power Actually Moves: A Government Affairs Function That Outlasts Its People, a book about how institutions see what is changing, understand where power actually sits, act while options still exist and remember what they have learned. Its central argument is that excellence held in a person is not the same as capability held by an institution, and that institutions which preserve what they learn can compound that capability over time.

He serves as Assistant Treasurer of Friends of Art & Design High School and as a board member of Excel Golf.