Michael Strong

Michael Strong was born in 1960 in Denver to teenage working class parents, who then moved the family to a farm in northern Minnesota in 1970, where they lived a life full of rasberries, cows, milk, pigs, hay, and cow manure. He spent his last year and a half of high school in Aspen, where he graduated before going to Harvard. He left Harvard after one year to attend St. John's College in Santa Fe. He had expected the year at St. John's to be a "year abroad" leading to a return to Harvard, but he loved the Socratic Seminar program there and went on to graduate first in his class at St. John's.

He had acquired a deep interest in political philosophy and the philosophy of science, and went to the University of Chicago to study why the Chicago economists, who considered themselves scientists, were advocates of free markets, which seemed self-evidently harmful. He gradually developed respect for free market economics and began a dissertation under Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker on "Ideas and Culture as Human Capital" while training Chicago public school teachers in how to lead Socratic Seminars.

Before finishing his dissertation he was hired as a full-time Socratic teacher trainer in Homer, Alaska. That led to a fifteen year career in education, starting as a public school reformer and leading to the creation of innovative private schools and programs in Alaska, Texas, Florida, California, and a charter school in New Mexico that was ranked the 36th best public high school in the U.S. on the Washington Post Challenge Index. While working in education he consulted for hundreds of schools around the world and wrote "The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice." (For more Michael's more recent writing on education, see his articles at http://www.flowidealism.org/michael.html).

While at his last school, he met John Mackey, the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market. John and Michael quickly discovered they shared an idealistic passion for making the world a better place - and that they believed that entrepreneurs and markets were the most effective means of creating a better world. Together they created Freedom Lights Our World (FLOW), a non-profit dedicated to "Liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good." This led to programs promoting Peace through Commerce, Accelerating Women Entrepreneurs, and Conscious Capitalism. The clearest statement of the FLOW perspective is "Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems" for which Michael is the lead author along with contributions by John Mackey, Muhammad Yunus, Hernando de Soto, Don Beck, and others.

Because global poverty is due to poor legal systems, Michael's research into entrepreneurial solutions to world problems has most recently led him into an exploration of legal techniques that will allow for the entrepreneurial creation of legal systems and the creation of Free Cities. He has blogged on these topics at "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom" and is working on creating Free Cities at various sites around the world.

Michael has two grown children and is married to Magatte Wade, the Senegalese serial entrepreneur who founded Adina World Beverages and The Tiossano Tribe.