MICHAEL STRONG:
Michael Strong loves learning and hates school. After attending Harvard as an undergraduate, he left because he didn t like being talked at by famous people - instead he went to St. John s College, in Santa Fe, where he could talk about ideas. After graduating first in his class there, he went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, because he wanted to figure out why Chicago economists had such bad ideas and prove them wrong from the inside.
He ended up discovering that he hadn't really understood their ideas and began writing a dissertation under Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker. While working on his dissertation, he began leading Socratic discussions in Chicago Public Schools - and LOVED it. So he went to Alaska to train teachers to lead Socratic discussion. After that he spent the next ten years creating schools at which students got to think and talk about ideas in Alaska, Texas, Florida, California, and New Mexico. He then met John Mackey,
BE the Solution
CEO of Whole Foods, and they co-created a non-profit, FLOW, to promote entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. He has worked with socially-minded entrepreneurs from dozens of countries - which is how he met his wife, the Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade (who will be our Entrepreneur-in-Residence).
He has written dozens of articles for popular media, specialty magazines, and academic journals and has given many talks around the world (See his TEDx talks on the next page).
He's also written two books, The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice and (as lead author) Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems which features a foreword by John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods.
by Svetlana Kim
Perreault Magazine - 46 -
Interview with Michael Strong