It seems that almost everywhere in the world, there is conflict, distrust, and unrest – Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, and even here in the US. Oftentimes, any kind of diplomacy, cooperation, agreement, detente or finding a common ground seems impossible. But what if there was a different way? What if there was an organization that holds as its mission, “to transform the way the world deals with conflict, away from adversarial approaches and toward cooperative solutions?” What if those tactics included dialogue training, joint development projects, public art projects, sports leagues, and social impact Entertainment via radio, TV, film, and print?

Well, these are all accomplishments that John Marks has achieved in his work as President of Search for Common Ground, a peacebuilding NGO he founded in 1982 and built with his wife Susan Collin Marks, predicated on social entrepreneurship. 

He is the coauthor of the controversial New York Times best-seller The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, the award-winning Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,”  and we’ll be doing a deep dive into his latest book, From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship, just recently published by Columbia University Press. 

John is also a Skoll Awardee in Social Entrepreneurship and an Ashoka Senior Fellow. The UN’s University of Peace awarded him an honorary doctorate for is work, and in 2018, Search for Common Ground was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I found From Vision to Action to be both a memoir and somewhat of a practitioner’s guide to the underlying principles of social entrepreneurship. It offers a master class in effective negotiation and conflict resolution. It builds on a core strategy of understanding differences and acting on commonalities. John uses his own experiences of creating real-life breakthroughs during his time leading Search for Common Ground. 

John’s pioneering work has genuinely made the world a safer and better place for us all – he is an inspiration.

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Dr. Chris Stout Clinical Psychologist

Dr. Chris Stout is a licensed clinical psychologist and international humanitarian with a diverse background in various domains. He is the Founding Director of the Center for Global Initiatives (a Top-Rated Nonprofit) and is the Executive Producer and Host of the popular “Living a Life in Full” a top-ranked podcast with an audience of over 3 million. He was a Fellow in the School of Public Health and Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago and prior to that he held an academic appointment at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He served as a NGO Special Representative and had the honor of speaking at the United Nations; he holds the distinction of being one of only 100 world-wide leaders appointed to the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow and was an Invited Faculty at the Annual Meeting in Davos.