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From Vision to Action

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FROM VISION TO ACTION

Remaking the World Through

Social Entrepreneurship

JOHN MARKS
Columbia University Press
New York

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 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2024 John Marks

All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-56086-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marks, John, 1943– author.
Title: From vision to action : remaking the world through social entrepreneurship / John
Marks.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2024] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024013006 | ISBN 9780231215572 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231215589
(trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231560863 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social entrepreneurship. | Social change. | Social action.
Classification: LCC HD60 .M3654 2024 | DDC 338/.04—dc23/eng/20240328
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024013006

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-
ebook@columbia.edu.

Cover design: Noah Arlow

Cover images: Shutterstock

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For Susan and Daniel

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Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you
astray.

—RUMI

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 Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1 Start from Vision

2 Be an Applied Visionary

3 On s’engage, et puis on voit

4 Keep Showing Up

5 Enroll Credible Supporters

6 Expect the Dunbar Factor

7 Make Yesable Propositions

8 Practice Aikido

9 Develop Effective Metaphors

10 Display Chutzpah
11 Cultivate Fingerspitzengefühl

12 Bringing It All Together

13 Moving On

Index

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 Acknowledgments

F
irst and foremost, I would like to thank Susan Collin Marks for
loving me and for working as my partner for the last three
decades. Susan read each draft chapter of this book and
made hugely useful suggestions. Although I am ultimately
responsible for the content, she is clearly the book’s godmother.
I would also like to thank Shamil Idriss, my successor as CEO of
Search, for his support and for his extraordinary contributions in
leading the organization.
Others who are currently at Search—or who once were—allowed
me to interview them about their memories of the work which we did
together. These people made a substantial contribution, and they are
listed in alphabetic order: Noufal Abboud, John Bell, Tom Dine, Eran
Fraenkel, Mary Jacksteit, Dirk-Jan Koch, Stephanie Koury, Sandra
Melone, Vilma Venkovska Milčev, Suheir Rasul, Sharon Rosen,
Oussama Safa, Michael Shipler, Lisa Shochat, and Lena
Slachmuijlder.
I also interviewed Ahmed Abaddi, Mohammed Belmahi, Emilio
Cassinello, Theodore Kattouf, Allen Grossman, and Augustus
Richard Norton. I thank them all—along with those who did not wish
to be cited.
I would like to extend special thanks to Karen Zehr who served
for fifteen years as Susan’s and my loyal assistant. Indeed, Karen
made an important contribution to this book when she suggested, as
I was getting ready to step down from the leadership of Search, that
she should make searchable scans of the many newsletters I had
written over the years. I wouldn’t have thought of this myself.
However, when it came to actually writing the book, being easily able
to find descriptions of incidents that took place up to thirty years ago
proved invaluable in reconstructing events.
Craig Whitney, the longtime New York Times reporter and my
friend since I was sixteen years old, graciously agreed to edit the first
draft of the manuscript, and he did a great job. I am extremely
grateful.
I send special thanks to Laurens Trimpe, my one-time squash
partner who contributed excellent technical support.
I would also like to thank Myles Thompson, my editor at
Columbia University Press, for choosing to publish the book and
guiding me through the process. It had been 45 years since I had
written an entire book, and Myles skillfully directed me on how to do
it in these current times. He was ably assisted in this role by Brian
Smith. Lastly, I would like to thank the project manager, Ben Kolstad,
and the copyeditor, Kathryn Mikel, who did such a good job in
clarifying my work.

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 Prologue

T
he year was 1989, and I was having dinner at a Holiday Inn
overlooking the ocean in Santa Monica, California. At the table
were William Colby, former director of the CIA; Ray Cline,
former CIA deputy director; Feodor Sherbak, former deputy director
of the KGB’s Internal Security Directorate; Valentin Zvezdenkov, the
KGB’s former chief of counterterrorism and former Rezident in Cuba;
and Igor Beliaev, a political observer with Liternaturnaya Gazeta
(figure 0.1). The guest list reflected a major shift in my life.
FIGURE 0.1 From left: Igor Beliaev, political observer, Literaturnaya Gazeta; Feodor
Sherbak, former first deputy director, Internal Security Directorate, KGB; William Colby,
former director, CIA; Ray Cline, former deputy director, CIA; Natalie Latter, interpreter; John
Marks, president, Search for Common Ground; Valentin Zvezdenkov, former director of
counterterrorism, KGB; and Oleg Proudkov, foreign editor, Literaturnaya Gazeta.

Previously, I had been adversarial to my core, and I had written

two books that revealed numerous abuses committed by the CIA.
The first, coauthored with Victor Marchetti, was a bestseller; the
second won a major award for investigative reporting. In the process,
I had been highly critical of one of my dinner companions that night,
William Colby. In The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, I had
described Colby’s role in Vietnam in heading the notorious Phoenix
and Counterterror programs that involved widespread torture and
assassination. Then, in 1974, I had confronted Colby in front of a
thousand people at a Washington, D.C. event at which he was the
guest of honor. I had called him to account—and was shouted down
—for the CIA’s covert role in overthrowing the democratically elected
government of Chile. And now here he was, fifteen years later,
participating in a project I had organized to promote Soviet-American
cooperation against terror, and he was breaking bread with high-
level retired KGB officers who had long been leaders of his main
enemy. Although the Cold War was ending at the time of our dinner,
dining with both the KGB and me must have been a bizarre
experience for Colby.
We were in Santa Monica because the Rand Corporation has its
headquarters in that city, and Rand was a partner in the current
project. At least for me, working with Rand added to the incongruity
because I had become a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, and Rand
was seen as the primary think tank in support of American
involvement in that war. Thus Rand had long been on my list of bad
guys.
Clearly, everyone present that evening had at one time or
another experienced profound differences with the other attendees.
It was a dinner of strange bedfellows who had come together to see
whether former enemies could find common ground around a shared
concern—the prevention of terrorism.
Search for Common Ground1 was the name of the nonprofit,
nongovernmental organization (NGO) I had founded seven years
earlier to carry out projects like this one. Search had a very large
vision: namely, to transform how the world dealt with conflict—
starting with U.S.-Soviet relations—moving away from adversarial,
win-lose approaches and toward nonadversarial, win-win problem-
solving. I was convinced—and still am—that peace is possible and
that even the most intractable conflicts can be resolved without
violence.
Political activists usually define themselves by what they oppose,
and I had been very much against the Vietnam War and the abuses
committed by the CIA. However, my belief system had undergone
considerable change by the time I sat down for dinner in Santa
Monica. Having attended a series of human potential and personal
growth workshops, I had begun to see grays in events that had once
seemed to be either black or white. I had become aware that there
was another way to work in the world. Instead of throwing monkey
wrenches into the old system—at which I had become rather adept
—I discovered that I wanted to build a new system. I had gradually
dropped the need to be in opposition, although sometimes I still
chose that option.
I had started to operate within the context of being for as
opposed to being against. As an individual, I still had my own private
views about which side in a conflict was more in the right and which
was mostly wrong. But as a person dedicated to creating a peaceful
world, I avoided getting caught up in divisive issues or favoring one
party over the other. To have done so would have made me a
participant in the conflict: part of the problem, not part of the solution.
I wanted to work with contending parties to resolve disputes. With
conflicts raging around the world, I was committed not to a particular
outcome but to the process of finding common ground. PBS-TV host
Jonathan Kwitny described my transition this way: “Marks moved
from provocateur to peacemaker.”

________________
1. The organization was originally called the Nuclear Network, but a year later my
colleagues and I decided to change the name to Search for Common Ground. It was
familiarly known as “Search,” and those of us who worked for it were often called
“Searchers.” These terms are used throughout the book. Search became one of the few
NGOs in the world whose name described its method of operating. In essence, Searchers
wore the organization’s name on their sleeve.

When I founded Search in 1982, I had never heard the term

social entrepreneur. In fact, beyond a few scholarly publications, the
idea of social entrepreneurship had not yet come into wide usage.
Bill Drayton, a pioneer in launching the field, happened to be a high
school classmate of mine. The same year I started Search, Drayton
launched Ashoka, a global network of social entrepreneurs that has
grown to about 4,000 members, of which I later became one. Way
back then, both Drayton and I headed much smaller operations. One
day in 1983 I sought his advice about my fledgling organization. He
listened as I described my vision and my approach, and then he
informed me that I was a social entrepreneur. Not knowing exactly
what he meant, I asked him to explain. He said that social
entrepreneurs were innovative activists who created new initiatives,
not for profit but to promote positive social change. That seemed to
me to be an accurate job description of the role I wanted to play in
leading Search. By telling me I was a social entrepreneur, Drayton
made me feel like the Molière character who suddenly realizes that
he has been speaking prose his whole life. I had been a social
entrepreneur without knowing that I was one.
Before my meeting with Drayton, I had thought of myself as a
public interest advocate. Subsequently, I began to describe myself
as a social entrepreneur. Although this semantic switch did not
appreciably alter the substance of my work, it provided me with an
empowering framework, and I was able to move Search from a
gleam in my eye into a global organization ready and able to
promote social change.
By declaring that I was a social entrepreneur, I became a
member of an international network of change makers. Most of my
fellow social entrepreneurs were working on different kinds of issues,
but we shared skills and tactics. Professionally we talked the same
language and dealt with similar problems. We all enjoyed the
extraordinary satisfaction that came from launching a new project,
nurturing it, and seeing it blossom into an initiative that made the
world a better place. I became convinced that significant change of
the sort I and so many others yearned for would be far more likely to
occur with substantial input from social entrepreneurs—
nongovernmental pathfinders skilled at translating their vision into
action.
My credentials as an activist social entrepreneur emerged from
my hands-on experience in building Search from zero into the
world’s largest NGO involved in peace building. My partner and
closest collaborator in this work was my wife, Susan Collin Marks. By
the time we stepped down from Search’s leadership in 2014, we had
a staff of six hundred and offices in thirty-five countries. Our
accomplishments were recognized by the Skoll Foundation, and they
named us among its elite fellowship of social entrepreneurs (figure
0.2). In 2018, the work we initiated was nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize.
FIGURE 0.2 John Marks is presented with a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship:
(from left) Sally Osberg, Robert Redford, John Marks, Ben Kingsley, and Jeff Skoll.

As a social entrepreneur, I was a self-taught practitioner—neither

a theoretician nor a scholar. Over the years I developed a set of
eleven working principles that formed the operational foundation for
my work. These principles provide the basic structure of this book,
and each is described in a separate chapter. The examples of how I
applied each principle are drawn from my own experience. Here are
summaries of the eleven principles.

1. Start from vision. Social entrepreneurs should have a clear

sense of their vision, and everything they do should be in
harmony with that vision—or at least should not be contrary to it.
2. Be an applied visionary. To be effective in changing the world,
social entrepreneurs must be able to break down complicated
tasks into finite, achievable pieces. They need to be
incrementally transformational—or transformationally
incremental.
3. “On s’engage, et puis on voit.” This is a quote from Napoleon
Bonaparte. A nonliteral translation is “one becomes engaged in
an activity, and then one sees new possibilities.” Napoleon was a
 soldier by profession, and he was referring to military operations.
His insight was that an attacking army needs to engage the
enemy in order to understand the nature of its defenses.
Similarly, social entrepreneurs have to be deeply engaged in
their projects to discover innovative steps and approaches that
they otherwise would not have seen.
4. Keep showing up. It has been said that “80 percent of success
is showing up.” For social entrepreneurs this means continuing
to show up and avoiding dabbling or parachuting. Social
entrepreneurs must commit themselves to long-term involvement
in the projects that matter to them.
5. Enroll credible supporters. Because social entrepreneurs
operate outside the proverbial box, they often are seen to be on
the margins. Prominent backers are not indispensable but can
be extremely helpful in moving forward their enterprises and
initiatives.
6. Expect the Dunbar Factor. Social entrepreneurs need to be
prepared to deal with high levels of complexity and uncertainty.
When they intervene in what are almost always complex
situations and systems, they are likely to face unanticipated
problems, questions they did not think to ask, and unexpected
outcomes.
7. Make yesable propositions. As Roger Fisher and William Ury
wrote in their seminal book Getting to Yes, things work much
better when people say “yes” to whatever is being proposed.
Social entrepreneurs should be skilled at crafting proposals that
are both in their interest and in the interest of the party to whom
they are making the request.
8. Practice aikido. In the Japanese martial art of aikido, when
someone is attacked, he or she does not try to reverse the
assailant’s energy flow by 180 degrees, as would be done in
boxing (where the basic idea is to knock an attacker backward).
In aikido, the person under attack accepts the attacker’s energy,
blends with it, and diverts it by ten or twenty degrees to make
both people safe. For social entrepreneurs, this means accepting
 a conflict or a situation as it is and blending with it while
transforming it one step at a time.
9. Develop effective metaphors. For social entrepreneurs,
communicating compelling models and stories is a crucial aspect
of being able to reframe reality. Most people will not shift their
attitudes and behaviors if they do not have a realistic picture of
where they are headed. An insightful metaphor or compelling
story is often crucial in providing that picture.
10. Display chutzpah. Chutzpah is a Yiddish word for effrontery or
audacity. Social entrepreneurs need to display sufficient nerve
to push into difficult, risky situations but only in respectful and
culturally appropriate ways. In other words, social
entrepreneurs need to be politely pushy.
11. Cultivate Fingerspitzengefühl. This German word means
having an intuitive sense of knowing at the tip of one’s fingers.
However, fingerspitzengefühl is not a quality that should be
used in all cases to override rational thinking. Instead, when
social entrepreneurs make decisions, they should factor in—but
not be overwhelmed by—what feels right. The trick is to develop
an appropriate mix of instinct and intellect.

This list of eleven principles has served me well, but I provide it

with a word of caution: These principles are not absolute rules that
must always be followed. They work most of the time, but sometimes
they don’t. I confess that there is not a principle among them that I
have not violated on occasion because I felt something else was
called for. Indeed, I strongly believe that social entrepreneurs should
not follow any fixed methodology or ideology too closely; they are
better served by displaying nimbleness and flexibility.
This book does not draw examples and stories from across the
whole field of social entrepreneurship. Instead, I use my experiences
at Search to illustrate how these underlying principles can be
applied. My intention—and hope—is that readers will internalize the
principles and employ them while adding insights gained from their
own experience.

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 1
Start from Vision

P
rinciple #1 of social entrepreneurship is “start from vision.” A
vision may appear in a flash or, as in my case, evolve from
insights and experiences gained over many years. Social
entrepreneurs need to have a clear sense of their vision—with the
understanding that it is not set in concrete and that it may well
change.
Individual social entrepreneurs almost always have different
visions. Mine center on peace building, whereas other people deal
with matters as varied as feeding the hungry, cleaning up the
environment, or reforming the criminal justice system. These are all
worthy causes. In this book, I focus on the processes and
methodology involved in being a social entrepreneur rather than on
the substance of various issues.
Social entrepreneurs should be able to boil down their vision into
a few sentences easily articulated in what is often called an elevator
speech. Above all, their vision needs to be authentic—not situational
or transactional—reflect their essence, and be based on deeply held
values. When social entrepreneurs reach the implementation stage,
their actions should be consistent with their vision—or at least not be
inconsistent with it. Once my core vision was in place, I was able to
hold onto it for the next forty years, although I kept finding new ways
to apply it.
My vision included ending—or at least improving—the adversarial
relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Like so
many people, I was terrified by the prospect of nuclear war during
the Cold War period. I genuinely believed, as Jonathan Schell
famously wrote, that the “fate of the earth” was at stake. If something
profound was not done, I feared that the superpowers were likely to
blow up the planet. Preventing nuclear war—in essence, saving the
world—provided me with a huge amount of motivation. It still does.
The best path I could see for reducing the threat was to move the
superpowers from confrontation to cooperation. It was with that goal
in mind that I worked in partnership with a Soviet colleague in 1989
to bring together in Santa Monica, California, former top officials of
the CIA and the KGB (see prologue).
During the first years of Search for Common Ground, my
approach did not reflect mainstream thinking among either hawks or
doves. President Ronald Reagan had branded the Soviet Union
(USSR) as the “Evil Empire,” and most Americans seemed to believe
that little or no common ground existed between the authoritarian
Soviet regime and what was then called the Free World. But as the
late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin would later say, “You don’t
make peace with friends.”
I had come to believe that real security required transforming the
very framework in which the United States and the USSR were
opposing each other. I was convinced that there had to be better
ways for the two countries to resolve their differences than
interacting as perpetual enemies; neither could feel secure until they
both felt secure. I became an advocate of what an international
commission headed by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme called
“common security.” This concept reflected a very different—indeed, a
transformational—way of dealing with security questions. The Palme
Commission had declared that hostile, win-lose techniques were not
only dangerous but in the end were ineffective and unworkable.
I have vivid memories of two incidents in which I failed to
convince people on both sides of the political spectrum of the validity
of my approach. The first occurred at a liberal Washington, D.C.
think tank where arms control issues were being discussed. After
listening to an interminable discussion of delivery systems, throw
weights, and warheads, I saw an opening and thought perhaps I
could get those present to see nuclear issues in a different context.
My idea was to tell an insightful Sufi story I had first heard from my
friend Abdul Aziz Said, a professor at the American University who
was also a Sufi master.
The story describes a man who loses his keys as he walks down
a street in the middle of the night. He is on his hands and knees
underneath a streetlight looking for the keys when a second man
comes along and offers to help. After a futile half-hour search, the
second man says to the first, “Are you sure this is where you lost
your keys?”
The first man replies, “No. I lost them across the street.”
The second says, “So, why are we looking here?”
The first answers, “Because this is where the light is shining.”
I felt that arms control had become the liberal opposition’s center
of attention because that was where the light was shining.
The think tankers reacted to my story with blank stares. What did
losing keys have to do with arms control? There was virtually no
recognition, despite my explanation, that I was calling for a paradigm
shift regarding the U.S.-Soviet conflict and that arms control
limitations would not in themselves solve the problem. I was moved,
above all, by what Albert Einstein had said: “We shall require a
substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
My second instance of miscommunication occurred at the
Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. I had secured an
invitation to show a half-hour documentary film on Common Security
that I had written for the TV series I was then producing for U.S.
public TV stations. After watching my film, Cord Meyer, a hard-line
Cold Warrior and retired CIA operator, declared, “I don’t want to live
in that kind of world.”
Not only did my vision include living in that kind of world, but I
was committed to helping to create it. I did not accept the premise
that an adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union was inevitable.
My work encompassed another possibility: namely, that peaceful,
win-win solutions could be found for contentious problems—even
those between the United States and the USSR.
I came to see that I needed to be able to share my vision in ways
to which an audience could easily relate. This was particularly
important for fund-raising purposes. Although I had the audacity to
believe I could change the world, my good intentions alone were
obviously not enough: I needed to be able to raise funds. This was a
particularly difficult task during the first years when Search was still a
tiny organization with only two employees, including me. In addition,
I was told repeatedly that the name “Search for Common Ground”
sounded flaky and that the organization had virtually no track record.
As a result, established donors were reluctant to support us.
I made a virtue out of necessity and adopted what I called a
Tupperware approach to fund-raising. That is, I stood up in living
rooms and made what I hoped was a convincing pitch to sell my
product. But I was not peddling pots and pans; I was sharing a vision
of how to save the planet.
Somehow it worked, and Search was able to limp through those
early years. Before I began, I had not understood that as the founder
I was the “float” in the organization, that is, I was the only person
willing to keep working even when there was not enough money to
pay full salaries. In fact, I am not sure Search would have survived
those rocky first days if my mother had not died during that period.
As sad as I was about her passing, I was grateful that she left me a
modest bequest in her will. My father, who was the soul of
practicality, told me that I should invest the money in stocks and
bonds and build a nest egg for the future. His advice came straight
from being a youth during the Great Depression, when he had felt
compelled to drop out of college to support his parents. I, on the
other hand, was a creature of the post–World War II boom years,
and to me everything seemed possible. With the money my mother
left me, I decided that instead of buying securities, as my father
advised, I would invest in my vision. My father said that this would
cause me—as he so eloquently put it—“to piss away my
inheritance.” I ignored him, and as he predicted, within a few years
all the money my mother left me was gone. I had spent it to make up
the difference between the salary I was supposed to receive, which
Search could not always afford, and the amount that I was actually
paid. This turned out to be the best investment I ever made. I will
always be grateful to my mother for making it possible. If the world
were a fairer place, all social entrepreneurs would start with a similar
nest egg, but that unfortunately is not the case. I was very lucky.
Concentrating as I was on the U.S.-Soviet conflict and the
nuclear issue, I developed an easy-to-understand extended
metaphor that I shared at Tupperware sessions to describe Search’s
approach. This became, in effect, my go-to metaphor. I asserted that
the nuclear arms race between the superpowers was like two boys
standing knee-deep in a room full of gasoline. One held ten matches;
the other had seven. The boys were incessantly arguing over who
had the most matches and who had the most explosive mix. To
lessen the danger, the most common solution was to reduce the
number of matches or to change the mix. In the real world, this was
called arms control. For my part, I did not doubt that the mix and the
quality of matches—that is, nuclear weapons—was important; that
certain weapons were particularly perilous; that accidental ignition
posed a huge threat; or that it would be destabilizing if one boy had
too many matches or if the combination that he held provided a
qualitative edge. However, I was much more concerned with the
overall environment within which the boys were interacting. After all,
they were standing knee-deep in gasoline, and one match could
ignite everything.
Therefore, my primary interest was not to change the numbers or
the mix but to drain the gasoline from the room—to shift the political
climate or the paradigm within which the superpowers were
confronting each other. I felt that the nuclear threat would not be
lifted until the United States and the Soviet Union ended their win-
lose, picking-at-scabs approach. For that to happen, the two sides
needed to realize that they shared a common interest in cooperating
and making the other feel secure. My metaphor of boys holding
matches seemed to illustrate the need for transformation of the U.S.-
Soviet relationship.
I recommend that social entrepreneurs develop extended
metaphors, like this one, that embody their vision. Nevertheless,
after the Cold War ended, I was never able to find a single metaphor
that was equally encompassing. The best I could do was to devise
mixed or multiple metaphors. These also proved to be effective, but
they were much more difficult to articulate in an elevator.
 Still, my gasoline-soaked imagery proved to be prophetic. Under
the leadership of presidents Gorbachev and Reagan, the Soviet
Union and the United States subsequently went through a profound
transformation and greatly reduced the volatility of their relationship.
Although their nuclear arsenals remained largely in place and the
two countries retained the ability to destroy the earth, through the
détente process nuclear war between them ceased to be an
imminent threat. The superpowers stopped confronting each other
as enemies. With a changed mindset toward the other in both
countries, the threat that they would use their nukes mostly
disappeared. At least in the beginning, the mix and number of
matches did not change that much, but the environment in which the
two countries faced each other became much less combustible. In
essence, Reagan and Gorbachev were able to drain most of the
gasoline from the room. Unfortunately, thirty-five years later, the
confrontation surrounding the Ukraine War has resulted in large
amounts of gasoline flooding back into the American-Russian
relationship.
Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War confirmed my belief that
even the most entrenched conflicts could be resolved without
violence. I understood full well that this was an optimistic view, but
then I am an optimist—which is probably a necessary quality for
being a successful social entrepreneur. I certainly needed to be an
optimist to start an organization called Search for Common Ground. I
did not ignore the momentous problems that humanity faced, but I
chose to see things as John Gardner, a former U.S. cabinet member
and seminal thinker, saw them: “What we have before us are some
breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”
However, optimism alone is not enough. Like any social
entrepreneur, I also needed to have the ability to make things
happen. That was an important factor in both building an
organization and launching new projects. If I had not believed I could
contribute to meaningful social change, I probably would have
chosen to lead a very different life. Instead, I stayed true to the idea
that I could—and should—make a difference.
When people told me that something could not be done, I usually
replied, “Let’s find a way.” Sometimes foolishly and sometimes
wisely, I rejected the idea that most things were not possible. In
some cultures, being told “no” absolutely means “no.” In other
places, and particularly to successful social entrepreneurs, refusing
to take “no” for an answer is a useful quality—except on those
occasions when it is not.
I tried to avoid being Pollyannaish, and I realized that events
rarely moved forward on a predictable, straight-line basis. I found
that the path of progress closely resembled a roller coaster—full of
ups and downs. I admit that I very much preferred the ups, and I was
confident that the overall thrust of human consciousness was moving
in a positive direction. This optimistic belief was very much part of
who I am—and of Search.
To implement our collective vision, my fellow Searchers and I
almost certainly could not have acted alone as individuals. We
needed the organizational base that Search gave us. To paraphrase
Archimedes, Search provided a place to stand from which we could
move the world—or at least try to do so. More generally, without an
organization, social entrepreneurs usually cannot function in world-
altering ways. As Jean Monnet, the founding father of the European
Union, said, “Nothing changes without individuals. Nothing lasts
without institutions.”
After the U.S.-Soviet nuclear threat receded, my colleagues and I
emphasized the prevention of violent conflict as a key part of our
vision (figure 1.1). We noted that tens of millions of people worldwide
were caught up in violence and, as a result, hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, were dying every year. Violence shattered lives. It
blocked development, and it almost always devastated the
environment. In short, we Searchers believed that global problems
were simply too complex and interconnected to be settled on a
violent, adversarial basis.
FIGURE 1.1 Search violence prevention poster.

We operated from the premise that the earth was running out of
space, resources, and recuperative capacity, and humanity could not
survive an excess of wasteful conflict. We found a practical and
ethical imperative for creating a peaceful, nonviolent world that
offered dignified, decent lives for all. Our role became to develop
innovative ways to apply our vision to create such a world.
OceanofPDF.com
 2
Be an Applied Visionary

I
t’s not particularly useful for social entrepreneurs to be pure
visionaries unless they intend to start a new religion or write a
philosophy textbook. Principle #2 of social entrepreneurship is “be
an applied visionary.” This requires being able to break down a core
vision into finite, achievable pieces and then to make things happen.
The goal is to produce concrete results that are consistent with that
vision—or at least not inconsistent with it.
Although social entrepreneurs may have an enlightened vision
and lofty intentions, they have no choice but to move forward one
step at a time. They should be what I call salami slicers. In other
words, they need to have a knack for slicing off one attainable piece
at a time. If they go for an overwhelming, unified solution—a magic
bullet—they are likely to fail. However, if a part of their overall goal is
within reach, that probably is the place for them to start.
A small victory is almost always more useful than a large failure.
By scoring a success, even a modest one, social entrepreneurs can
lay the groundwork for achieving their overall objectives. And their
timing needs to be right. If they move too quickly or are too far ahead
of the curve, they will probably be viewed as dreamers who are out
of touch with reality. However, if they are too slow in reacting to an
opportunity and others have already become engaged, there may be
little reason for them to proceed. I have found that being six months
to a year in front of conventional wisdom is a good place to be when
doing groundbreaking work.
 An example of how I applied my vision in a way that managed to
be ahead of where governments were—but not too far ahead—
follows. I am referring to the counterterrorism project whose
concluding dinner was celebrated at the Holiday Inn in Santa
Monica, California, described in the prologue.
In those Cold War days, I believed the best way to stimulate the
“new manner of thinking” Einstein called for was to develop initiatives
that brought Soviets and Americans together to achieve shared
goals. Instead of facing each other as enemies, they could stand
side by side, take on common problems, and cooperate to resolve
issues. This approach called for getting key players from both
countries to focus on what united them rather than on what
separated them. It did not require either group to give up strongly
held positions or to compromise its principles. Not only could their
joint action have an important impact in its own right, but we
Searchers believed it could also build confidence that would lead to
finding solutions to major disputes. This approach did not
necessitate ignoring the many aspects of the Soviet system that
Americans found abhorrent—such as human rights violations, lack of
freedom, and occupation of Eastern Europe—instead it involved not
letting those differences alone define the relationship.
A proponent of a similar strategy was the same Ronald Reagan
who in 1983 had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” Two
years later Reagan was meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev in Geneva, and Gorbachev later told an American TV
audience this story: “President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What
would you do if the United States were attacked by someone from
outer space? Would you help us?’ I said, ‘No doubt about it.’ ”
Although this story may sound hard to believe, it was later confirmed
by former Secretary of State George Shultz, who was present in the
room as the two presidents talked.
I did not agree with Reagan on most matters, and I certainly saw
no possibility that there would be an attack from Mars. But I was an
applied visionary who realized that Reagan’s idea of bringing
adversaries together around a subject of mutual concern could be
useful in achieving what social psychologist Muzafer Sherif
described as a “superordinate goal”—that is, a shared objective that
is jointly pursued by parties in conflict.
At a Search workshop in South Africa, I mentioned this strategy
to Andrew Masondo, a one-time warrior who had headed the “Spear
of the Nation,” the armed wing of the African National Congress
(ANC). Now that apartheid had ended, he was thinking like a
peacemaker. He listened to what I described I wanted to do, and he
summed up Search’s approach thusly: “Understand the differences;
act on the commonalities.” We made his articulation into our
organizational mantra.
My first attempt to operationalize this concept was a scheme to
get the United States and the Soviet Union to collaborate in
immunizing the world’s children against childhood diseases such as
measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria. In those long-ago days
before vaccines were a divisive political issue, I believed that even
ardent Cold Warriors would not oppose expanding their use. I
reasoned that the USSR and the United States could be convinced
to work together for the greater good. I assumed that saving the lives
of children was an obvious commonality, but that did not prove to be
the case. To my disappointment, the initiative did not achieve the
intended results, but it did turn out very well on the unintended side.
As good an idea as this might have been, if a small organization
like Search were the proposer, I believed we would probably be
ignored. However, if I could somehow convince an actual
government to invite the United States and the USSR to participate,
the two countries would be more likely to say “yes.” I thought
Canada would make a good convener because what I was
proposing seemed consistent with that country’s peace building and
humanitarian traditions, as exemplified by former Prime Minister
Lester Pearson. Also, I had an introduction to a key Canadian
ambassador, so there seemed to be a pathway to top-level approval.
I made an appointment to see the Canadian ambassador to
whom I had been referred. He liked the idea and said he would
propose it to the powers that be in Ottawa. Later, a well-placed
Canadian diplomat told me what had happened to my proposal. The
good news was that Canadian policymakers agreed to carry out a
comprehensive initiative to immunize children, and they allocated a
large sum of money to the project. The bad news, from my
perspective, was that they eliminated the part of the proposal that
called for inviting Americans and Soviets to work together in the
implementation. It seemed that the Canadians did not want to do
something that might displease the U.S. government. In those early
days of the Reagan presidency—before Gorbachev had
implemented glasnost and perestroika—the United States was not
keen on positive initiatives that included the Soviet Union. My source
said I should be proud because the Canadian immunization program
presumably saved many lives, but I was disappointed. My goal had
been to reduce the adversarial quality of the Cold War—in addition
to saving the lives of children.
This was one of the first examples of a phenomenon I would
witness many times in my career as an activist social entrepreneur:
namely, that the unintended consequences of an initiative often
ended up being as good or better than the intended ones. In this
case, I would have preferred a different outcome, but I also realized
that I would be wise to embrace a positive result whenever it
occurred, regardless of whether it had been part of the original plan.
Like a child’s windup toy truck that moves forward until it hits an
obstacle and then backs off and finds another way around, I
persisted in my search for a superordinate project. In 1988, I found
what I was looking for, and the timing was very important, if not
everything. By then, the Cold War was winding down, and the
Gorbachev-led Soviet Union was losing its sinister reputation. There
is an old saying that it is easier to ride a horse in the direction it is
going. At this point in the Reagan-Gorbachev bromance, the two
countries were already moving away from a contentious relationship,
and détente was becoming a reality. The project I came up with
would have been impossible a few years earlier, but now it seemed
feasible. In my view, it was within the range of possible
intergovernmental action, but Moscow and Washington had not yet
gotten around to doing it. This left an opening for our Track 2
diplomacy.1

________________
1. Track 2 diplomacy is a phrase coined by former Foreign Service Officer Joseph Montville
at a 1980 meeting I attended at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. It refers to
unofficial, people-to-people initiatives—as opposed to Track 1, which involves official
dealings between governments. Track 2 has become the universally accepted term for such
activities, which Esalen’s Soviet-American program pioneered in carrying out.

I got my chance to launch the project while I was attending a

conference sponsored by the Center for Soviet-American Dialogue.
This was a meeting of several hundred Americans and Soviets who
were asked to brainstorm ways to improve relations between the two
superpowers. The idea was for participants to develop cooperative
projects. I was assigned the task of cochairing a working group on
security issues, and my Soviet counterpart was Igor Beliaev, a well-
known writer for a popular Soviet publication, Literaturnaya Gazeta.
Beliaev and I, although not instant soulmates, got along well, and I
convinced him that our best chance to make a difference was to
identify a single issue on which effective Soviet-American
collaboration might be possible. Regional conflicts, such as those in
Afghanistan and Nicaragua, seemed too well entrenched in the
official agendas of the two governments for us as citizen diplomats to
make an impact, so Beliaev and I looked for another issue on which
we could productively work. We agreed that we needed to find a
subject that was important—but not overly so. We decided that the
prevention of terrorism would be our focus, and we signed a
memorandum of understanding (MOU) to establish what we rather
grandly called the U.S.-Soviet Task Force to Prevent Terrorism.
Terrorism may seem like a strange choice in today’s context, but
in the days before 9/11, it was not a front-burner issue. Thus it
seemed more susceptible to our Track 2 approach than matters that
were regularly in the headlines. Certainly, the United States had
terrorism experts, but they were not at the forefront of the foreign
policy field. According to Beliaev, until 1985 in the Soviet Union, the
prevailing view had been that terrorism was a Western problem of
concern only to capitalists. Then four Soviet officials were kidnapped
in Beirut, and the Soviet government for the first time condemned an
act of terrorism aimed at its citizens abroad. Subsequently, the
terrorists murdered one of their hostages and raised fears in Moscow
that all Soviets traveling abroad would become targets. At this point,
according to rumors that widely circulated in the West but were
officially denied in Moscow, KGB operatives supposedly seized an
accomplice of the suspected kidnappers and castrated him. Whether
or not there is any truth to this story, the three remaining hostages
were soon released. Afterward, Western terrorist experts spoke
enviously of this Soviet no-nonsense approach to counterterrorism.
In any case, terrorism did not fit comfortably within the Soviet
concept of class struggle. During the Cold War, Soviets and, for that
matter, Americans were inclined to look at terrorism through the
prism of national liberation movements and ideological clashes.
There was an oft-repeated saying that one side’s freedom fighters
were the other’s terrorists. For Americans and Soviets alike, what
seemed to matter most was the organizational affiliation of the
terrorist—or freedom fighter—not the nature of the acts committed.
During those years, the United States and the USSR both backed
groups that used what today would be termed “terror tactics.” The
two countries and their allies regularly supported violent,
unconventional warriors whose struggle was opposed by the other
superpower. For example, in Afghanistan the United States funded
and armed the mujahideen, who routinely used bombing and
assassination in their fight against the communist government and
the Soviet occupiers. Similarly, America supported the Contras in
Nicaragua and UNITA in Angola, both of which the Soviets and their
allies branded as terrorists who were violently trying to overthrow
legitimate governments. The Soviets, for their part, supported the
Viet Cong and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which both
used tactics the U.S. government called terroristic. Despite all this
history, our U.S.-Soviet Task Force took on the mission of showing
that the fight against terrorism was a shared problem faced by both
countries—and thus an area of possible common ground.
The task force’s first meeting took place in Moscow in January
1989. It had taken eleven months for Beliaev and me to piece
together the event, which was cosponsored by our two
organizations, Search for Common Ground and Literaturnaya
Gazeta (with the support of the Soviet Peace Committee).
Participants included scholars, journalists, lawyers, and officials who
were experts in terrorism and security issues. The original plan had
been to invite only unofficial, Track 2 participants, but Beliaev put
together a Soviet delegation that consisted of officials on active duty
with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs,
and several institutes inside the government’s Academy of Sciences.
On the American side, more than half of the dozen participants were
part-time consultants to the U.S. government on terrorism-related
issues. Our Track 2 gathering had become Track 1.5, and that
proved to be a good thing because both Beliaev and I wanted to
influence official policy. We recognized that having government
officials directly involved, supposedly in their private capacity,
increased the chances that our efforts would be successful.
I chose the American delegation by networking and referral. Most
of the people I approached were initially skittish about participating.
There were fears that their involvement might put their security
clearances at risk or otherwise offend key people inside the U.S.
government. My recruiting pitch was to invite potential participants to
travel to Moscow to meet with their Soviet counterparts. This was an
invitation to which American terror experts were inclined to say “yes”
because they were curious about what they might find out. Most of
them had never before gone to Moscow for professional reasons.
Counterterrorism gatherings tended to be held in cities like
Washington, D.C., London, and Tel Aviv, and the American experts
had not, on the whole, previously considered that they might even
have Soviet counterparts.
Still, the task force would never have existed if I had listened to
U.S. government officials who, during the months I was putting
together the project, actively tried to suppress the effort. On several
occasions, officials expressed concern that I was being duped and
that the Soviets would use the proceedings for propaganda
purposes. In fact, just before the American delegation was scheduled
to leave for Moscow, one of the participants, Colonel Augustus
Richard “Dick” Norton, a tenured associate professor at West Point
and a decorated combat infantryman, was summoned to the
Pentagon to meet the Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, Arthur E.
Brown Jr., a four-star general. Norton had never before been ordered
to attend a meeting with such a high-ranking officer.
 General Brown wanted to discuss the forthcoming meeting in
Moscow, and he was clearly unhappy about it. As Norton later put it,
the general showed “discernible discomfit.” Although the general did
not order him not to go, Norton concluded that as a career U.S. Army
officer it would probably be prudent for him to drop out. He now
believes that most other American officers would have done so.
Nevertheless, he courageously held his ground, and he did not
cancel. Thirty years later, Norton told me that he had been “intrigued
by the possibility of success.” He felt that his “academic freedom as
a member of the U.S. Military Academy faculty offered intellectual
license.” Shortly thereafter, he resigned his commission and left the
Army.
By the time Norton and the rest of the group got to Moscow, the
U.S. government clearly had softened its opposition and had started
to use the task force as a sounding board for new approaches.
During the month preceding the first meeting, the incoming George
H. W. Bush administration gave us its tacit blessing and asked for a
full report. The week before the task force convened, the KGB’s
Deputy Director, General Vitaly Ponomarev, declared publicly:

We realize we have to coordinate efforts to prevent terrorist acts, including

hijackings of planes. . . . We are willing, if there is a need, to cooperate even with
the CIA, the British intelligence service, the Israeli Mossad, and other services in
the West.

A high State Department official estimated that this statement

from the top of the KGB was timed to have an impact on our
meeting. Within days James Baker testified at his confirmation
hearing to be U.S. Secretary of State saying, “We ought to find out
whether Moscow can be helpful on [terrorism] . . . and if not, why
not.”
Although this high-level attention gave our group cause for
optimism, the participants who headed to Moscow remained
skeptical that anything useful would be accomplished. Cold War
attitudes died hard, and the notion that the other superpower had
something constructive to offer seemed far-fetched to many.
 Both American and Soviet participants were taking risks. The
Americans feared they might appear naive, or they might be walking
into a Soviet trap. Soviet participants were afraid that even talking to
Americans about preventing terrorism would be interpreted by their
friends in the Third World as abandonment or even a hostile act.
At the event, no one’s worst fears were realized, and things
turned out much better than most of the participants expected.
Those present were able to speak and probe without representing
fixed governmental positions, which is one of the virtues of Track 2
diplomacy. At the opening session I announced that at 3:00 a.m. the
next morning there would be an optional meeting at which
participants could engage in polemics; that everyone was free to
attend; but that I would not be coming myself. Participants laughed,
and from that point on contentious statements were mostly listened
to and not directly opposed. In this way, major arguments were
avoided, and the atmosphere remained calm and fruitful.
One member of the U.S. delegation was Marguerite Millhauser
(now Miriam Millhauser Castle), an expert not in terrorism but on
conflict resolution. Search was an organization that prided itself on
running meetings that produced positive results. Then and now
Searchers put a high premium on the use of good processes, and
meetings were often led by skilled facilitators who were able to
maintain a level playing field while moving the agenda forward. At
our sessions in Moscow, both Soviets and Americans accepted that
our facilitator had a mandate to break deadlocks and contribute to
the process of collaborative problem-solving.
Participants quickly reached an understanding that traditional
ways of discussing terrorism had led nowhere and that they needed
to develop a new approach for framing the issue. Both sides agreed
that it was futile to try to define who specifically was a terrorist or
who was a freedom fighter. Instead, they identified specific acts that,
without exception, they decided constituted terrorism. These
included:

• Hijacking or bombing of airplanes

• Taking of hostages
 • Attacking children or internationally protected persons, including
doctors, diplomats, and aid workers

Participants were unanimous that acts such as these should always

be considered to be criminal, regardless of the political affiliation of
the perpetrators. In other words, blowing up a civilian airplane was
never to be regarded as acceptable—no matter how noble the
motivating cause.
Once the participants adopted this approach, they were able to
make thirty specific recommendations of tactics and techniques to
prevent the forbidden acts. These involved cooperation in such
areas as intelligence-sharing, joint targeting of narco-terrorists,
thwarting money laundering, freeing hostages, and limiting the
transfer of weapons and explosives. There was a consensus that
ideological differences should not stand in the way of the two
countries working together to prevent heinous activities. The idea
was to separate out—or salami-slice—areas that were ripe for
agreement while agreeing to disagree on the rest.
The task force largely avoided the twin pitfalls of assigning blame
for past sins and making vague statements about the abstract future.
Participants accepted that neither country would be likely to cease
and desist all activities that the other found objectionable and labeled
as terroristic. Progress would not be contingent on either
government being required to change long-standing policies.
Cooperation would be implemented in addition to—not instead of—
existing unilateral efforts, and it would be based on the two nations
recognizing that their national security interests were best served by
collaborating where possible to reduce the common danger. With
these conclusions, the group succeeded in reframing the core issue
of terrorism, and in the process it drained gasoline from the volatile
U.S.-Soviet relationship.
After the meetings ended, the recommendations were reported
directly to the White House and to the Kremlin, and they attracted
considerable media attention in both countries. Within two months,
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Secretary of State
James Baker agreed to put anti-terrorist cooperation on the
superpower agenda, and then the two governments began working-
level meetings and reached their first agreements on cooperation to
prevent terrorism.
Both Soviet and American task force participants believed that
their work contributed to this new collaboration, and everyone was
particularly pleased during the following months when the U.S. and
Soviet governments cooperated to prevent the execution of Joseph
Cicippio, an American who was being held hostage in Lebanon.
Indeed, one American task force member, Brian Jenkins of the Rand
Corporation, told a BBC interviewer that without the efforts of the
task force the Soviet-American cooperation that he believed saved
Cicippio’s life would not have taken place.
Even though the Moscow meeting turned out well, several
participants urged that the task force should be expanded to include
people with hands-on operational experience in counterterrorism,
and that such people were usually found in intelligence agencies. I
wholeheartedly agreed, but Beliaev was initially skeptical that high-
level Soviet spooks—even former ones—could be enrolled. Without
waiting for his approval, I decided to gently push his hand. I recruited
former CIA director William Colby and former deputy director Ray
Cline. Then I sent a telex to Moscow (telexes were a pre-internet
way of communicating) telling Beliaev that Colby and Cline had
agreed to come to the next meeting that was going to be held in
Santa Monica. I requested that the Soviets include in their delegation
retired intelligence officials of “comparable protocol rank.” I must
have found the right language for such an invitation because soon
thereafter Beliaev telexed “yes.” He wrote that he had added to the
task force Feodor Sherbak and Valentin Zvezdenkov, both retired,
high-level KGB generals.
Around this same time I learned that Beliaev, my Soviet
counterpart, was related by marriage to Vladimir Kryuchkov, the
director of the KGB. Without this connection, I do not believe the
Soviets would have been willing to include participants like Sherbak
and Zvezdenkov.
As appreciative as I was that the task force was now going to
have both KGB and CIA participation, there was an unexpected side
effect. Many of the Soviet participants decided that I must be a CIA
employee, which I definitely was not. They came to this belief
because in their country it probably would have been impossible to
involve high-level spies—even retired ones—without personal
connections to the intelligence agencies, and they projected this
perspective onto the United States.
Never before had former top KGB officials come to the United
States to hold friendly meetings with their American counterparts. At
Search, we believed that this unprecedented development showed
the importance the KGB and the Soviet government under
Gorbachev placed on our meetings.
However, all didn’t go seamlessly for us in California. General
Sherbak’s suitcase did not turn up when the Pan American Airlines
plane carrying the Soviets landed in Los Angeles. In fact, his luggage
was permanently lost. Soviet and American participants alike agreed
that this was probably not a case of standard baggage mishandling.
Everyone smelled the harassing hand of the CIA or the FBI. We
Searchers made an emergency payment to Sherbak, and we took
him to the Sears store in downtown Santa Monica to buy new
clothes and toilet articles. He clearly was not amused by the incident,
but he was very professional about it. He did not let the loss limit his
participation.
Another problem was money. Our deal with the Soviets was that
they would pay for their airline tickets on Aeroflot from Moscow to
New York and that Search would be responsible for flying them on to
Los Angeles. That seemed fair, but unfortunately Search didn’t have
sufficient funds available to take care of our share. So Allen
Grossman, Search’s board chair who was an active participant in the
project, and I bridged the gap by contributing frequent flyer miles to
obtain the needed tickets. Grossman and I agreed that the project
was too important to be deterred by not having enough money on
hand to pay all the costs.
In what was clearly a mischievous move on my part, once the
Soviets arrived in California, I took them for a Sunday afternoon walk
on the boardwalk along Venice Beach, which is next to Santa
Monica. There they saw America at its freakiest and funkiest.
Subsequently, they were taken to Disneyland where they viewed the
country on a more wholesome level.
By coincidence, I flew to Los Angeles on the same plane as
former CIA director William Colby, and we wound up sitting across
the aisle from each other. He asked me what I thought he could
contribute to the meeting. I said I hoped to see an agreement
between Americans and Soviets for the exchange of intelligence to
combat terrorism. He took out some scrap paper and wrote a brief
description describing the mechanics of establishing such a liaison
channel.
After the meeting started, the former CIA and KGB officials—plus
Beliaev and me—formed what was euphemistically called the
subcommittee on information. Colby made a presentation to the
group that contained what he had previously written on the airplane,
and it became the basis for the understanding that the retired Soviet
and American intelligence professionals eventually reached.
Specifically, they agreed that both sides needed to protect sources
and methods but that their former services should exchange
intelligence that would aid the other in preventing terrorism. The ex-
KGB men made clear that future cooperation would probably result
in terrorist groups targeting Soviets, but they said that the added risk
was necessary to curb terrorism. The group also recommended that
neither the United States nor the USSR should provide weapons to
armed groups that would be useful to terrorists (e.g., surface-to-air
missiles or plastic explosives).
Ray Cline, another American participant who had once been CIA
deputy director and for whom I had directly worked in my earlier
career in the U.S. diplomatic service, wrote an article about our
meetings that was published in the Washington Post. He said that
before attending the sessions in Santa Monica, he had only dealt
with the KGB in “an essentially adversarial context.” He continued:

The KGB came to the United States to assure some of those who would
understand that whatever happened in the past, it really wants to exchange
information with US intelligence agencies to suppress terrorists now. What they
can and will deliver remains to be explored in official channels. But Gorbachev’s
seriousness of intent was crystal clear. Our private scholars’ delegation was
getting an official message.
 Needless to say, the convening of top-level retired CIA and KGB
officials attracted considerable attention in both the Soviet and
American medias. The Los Angeles Times headlined that it was an
“unprecedented joint effort.” ABC-TV’s Nightline devoted a whole
show to the prospect of cooperation to prevent terrorism. Host Ted
Koppel introduced the program by saying:

If you find it difficult to believe that the CIA and the KGB might be on the verge of
cooperating with one another in the near future, your instincts are probably right.
Nevertheless, high-ranking former officials from both agencies have been meeting
out in California this week at a conference sponsored by the Rand Corporation
and an organization called Search for Common Ground.

It seemed to me that Koppel rolled his eyes when he said the

words “Search for Common Ground.” In any event, this initiative not
only gave us our first significant media exposure but also propelled
us into the realm of popular culture, and T-shirts soon appeared for
sale in Washington, D.C. that said, “Together at Last! The New
KGB/CIA. Now We’re Everywhere.”
Participants agreed that they would take the task force’s
recommendations back to their governments. The retired KGB
generals, Sherbak and Zvezdenkov, reported directly to KGB
Director Kruyuchkov and his senior staff, and in December 1989 the
KGB Politburo formally accepted the task force’s recommendations
on the need for intelligence-sharing with the CIA. However, when
Colby and Cline took the same proposals to CIA Director William
Webster, they were rebuffed on the grounds that the KGB was a
secret police organization, not an intelligence agency like the CIA.
Webster emphatically stated that there was no equivalence between
the two secret services, that the CIA had no intention of cooperating
with the KGB, and that our task force should take its
recommendations to the State Department.
That is where things rested until something happened that no one
had foreseen and that brought the task force’s recommendations to
the CIA’s front burner. In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and
America’s national security establishment began to prepare for what
would be called the Gulf War. The U.S. government suddenly had a
great need for intelligence on Iraq, and it had few assets there. It
became clear that the intelligence agency with the most prior
experience and best connections in Iraq was the KGB, and the CIA
was now under pressure from the White House to seek its help. In
October 1990, CIA Director Webster told the Associated Press that
his agency and the KGB were sharing intelligence about terrorist
threats and that, on several occasions, U.S. information had been
“pivotal” to Soviet preventive action.
It will probably never be known to what extent our U.S.-Soviet
Task Force to Prevent Terrorism was responsible for this
cooperation. Nevertheless, it can be said that the possibility of such
cooperation had not seriously been raised before the task force got
involved, and that our recommendation for an intelligence exchange
between the CIA and the KGB was eventually accepted. If the task
force had not existed, probably a similar liaison channel would have
been, by necessity, set up. The Gulf War certainly was a catalytic
event, and our task force was unquestionably in the right place at the
right time.
FIGURE 2.1 Book cover of Common Ground on Terrorism, published by Norton in 1991.

This project, which Beliaev and I describe in the book Common

Ground on Terrorism (figure 2.1), turned out to be a breakthrough for
me personally and for Search as an organization. The evening after
the retired spooks reached agreement in Santa Monica, I invited
them to the Holiday Inn for the celebratory dinner described in the
prologue. To get the conversation started, which is always difficult
with covert operators who are usually reluctant to provide personal
information about themselves, I asked those around the table to talk
about their background. To set an example, I went first. I said that I
had resigned from the State Department in protest after the United
States invaded Cambodia in 1970, and that I had later written books
that were critical of the CIA. KGB General Zvezdenkov responded,
“So you were a troublemaker.” To his credit, Colby, my one-time
adversary, responded, “I can confirm he was a troublemaker, but
now we are working together for the greater good.”
That was an important moment for me because it seemed to
represent the completion of my previous career when my work had
been defined by what I was against. Now, instead of being critical of
the old system, I was working with former adversaries to build a new
system. With no apologies for what I had previously done, my job
was transformed into being for something—for making the world
more peaceful and cooperative.
As for Search, the success of the project caused the outside
world to see us as a more serious organization. The initiative greatly
exceeded expectations, and Foreign Affairs, the establishment
journal, called our efforts “pioneer work.” We had previously been
operating on the fringes, and this initiative helped move us into the
mainstream. To get there, we had stayed true to our vision, and we
had not in any way compromised our values. It helped hugely that
the world was moving away from the belief that the fundamental
issue of international relations was the clash between capitalism and
communism. History was definitely headed in the direction we
desired.
Although the Cold War was coming to an end, we recognized that
there was no shortage of other conflicts where we could take a
similar approach. In the years that followed, we turned our attention
away from the Soviet Union and Russia and focused on the Middle
East, Africa, and the Balkans. We became global Search.

OceanofPDF.com
 3
On s’engage, et puis on voit

P
rinciple 3 of social entrepreneurship is “on s’engage, et puis
on voit.” A nonliteral translation from the original French is
“one becomes engaged in an activity, and then one sees new
possibilities.”
Napoleon Bonaparte, a soldier by profession, first uttered these
words. Engaging the enemy and then seeing the opportunities
reflected his military perspective. He understood that the best way to
discern the shape of the defenses of the troops he faced was to
attack and then base subsequent moves on the enemy’s reaction. As
a peace-loving civilian, I only applied this Napoleonic principle
metaphorically. I didn’t go around beating up opponents to see how
they defended themselves.
The lesson for social entrepreneurs—and business
entrepreneurs, for that matter—is that once engaged in an activity
they will see openings that were not visible at the start. In this way,
they will discover paths forward that they had not known existed. Out
of their engagement can come the building blocks for what comes
next—and next and next.
This way of operating—on s’engage, et puis on voit—became a
key part of how I functioned in building Search. I found it almost
impossible to plan ahead more than a few moves—both when
starting a new project and when bringing an existing one to fruition.
Rather, by being engaged, unforeseen prospects often emerged
from what had come before. Sticking slavishly to a predetermined
plan did not usually work, and excessive planning was often a barrier
to moving forward. As boxing champion Mike Tyson once said,
“Everyone has a plan until they’ve been punched in the mouth.” The
Soviets learned this the hard way with their five-year plans.
As a general rule, successful entrepreneurs need to be able to
make midcourse corrections that grow out of their prior engagement.
But accepting the need for continuing adjustments is not easy for
people who prize regularity and predictability. Nor is it easy for
entrenched bureaucrats who want to be told exactly what the plan is.
If budding social entrepreneurs find it distressing not to know what
the outcome will be, and if they cannot deal well with the
unexpected, they should probably make a different career choice.
Successful social entrepreneurship almost always requires a high
tolerance for ambiguity. Practitioners need to be comfortable with not
knowing. It usually helps considerably if they have confidence that
they are likely to wind up in a good place no matter what happens.
On s’engage, et puis on voit worked well for me on the personal
as well as on the professional level. I cite the case of my own love
life. When I founded Search in 1982, I had no expectation of ever
finding a wife with whom I would work closely. During Search’s first
eleven years, I was a divorced bachelor, and my private life was
mostly disconnected from my job. In 1993, I traveled to South Africa
to produce a television series titled South Africa’s Search for
Common Ground. On my fourth night in Cape Town, I went out for a
few beers with my coproducer, a lovely Afrikaner guy named Hannes
Siebert. He asked if I were married, and I answered that I was
divorced. Then I said something I had never said before: “But I’m
looking.”
He replied, “What are you looking for?”
I answered, “A tall, beautiful mediator.”
He said, “I know one.”
The next day Siebert introduced me to Susan Collin (figure 3.1).
She was working as a facilitator and conflict resolver in South
Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. I was smitten, and
so, apparently, was she. Within twenty-six hours, we both
understood that this was the real thing. After two days, Susan
informed me that she and I were destined not only to be a couple but
also to work together. Initially, the idea freaked me out, and it took
several hours for me to internalize her declaration that the two of us
would be partners both personally and professionally. Not only was I
engaged, but soon we became engaged.
FIGURE 3.1 The former Susan Collin and John Marks when we met in South Africa.

Nine months after we met Susan moved to Washington, D.C.,

and we were married. She became Susan Collin Marks, and she
joined me as Senior Vice President of Search. I would have
preferred for us to be copresidents, but Search’s board of directors
did not approve.
Although we shared similar values and beliefs, we brought
different perspectives to what became our combined work. She had
a more heart-centered approach than I did, but she also contributed
extraordinary intellectual and problem-solving skills. From her work
in the South African peace process, she had considerable on the
ground experience. She was used to working in the middle of parties
in violent conflict. In fact, she had even been shot in the leg with a
rubber bullet while trying to mediate between White policemen and
angry Black demonstrators. I tended to operate mostly from my
head, and my specialty was in putting together new projects. The
qualities we brought to our work were complementary, and our
relationship seemed greater than the sum of its parts. In addition,
working together provided us with a constant stream of things to talk
about.
Before 1994 when Susan joined me in Washington, D.C.,
Search’s budget had been mostly stagnant. After Susan came on
board, the organization grew over the next two decades at a rate of
about 20 percent per year. In my view, that was not a coincidence; it
was a result of our joint leadership. Harvard Business School does
not teach that organizational growth depends on marrying well, but
that certainly proved to be true in our case.
Susan and I came together at a time when the Cold War was
winding down, and there clearly was less space for Track 2 activities
in the U.S.-Soviet domain. A prime example of on s’engage, et puis
on voit resulted in what became Search’s next big thing. Here is
what happened.
From their involvement with the terrorism project, Dick Norton
and Salim Nasr saw a new possibility. Norton was the U.S. Army
colonel a four-star general had cautioned not to travel to Moscow
with the U.S.-Soviet Task Force to Prevent Terrorism. Nasr was a
Lebanese professor who was then teaching at Georgetown
University. The two men came up with a very interesting idea. They
wanted to stop the bloody civil war in Lebanon, and they suggested
that Search set up a U.S.-Soviet Task Force on Lebanon structured
along the lines of what we had developed for terrorism. Both
superpowers had allies who were deeply involved in the Lebanese
conflict, and they surmised that a collaborative effort by Moscow and
Washington could play a key role in ending the fighting. This was
during the Gorbachev years when the USSR and the United States
were already cooperating in several other places. Why not in
Lebanon where cooperation might save lives?
I loved the idea. The fact that I had not been the one to think of it
made no difference. It was clear to me that a social entrepreneur
needs to be open to proposals from others—and ready to act on
them if and when the moment seems right.
The prospect of a U.S.-Soviet Task Force on Lebanon did not
emerge through a carefully constructed planning process. Rather, it
grew organically out of a previous project, and it was a feasible
follow-on. If Norton and Nasr had not been engaged, they would not
have seen the possibility of taking a similar approach in Lebanon;
nor would I have. I decided that was too good an opportunity to pass
up, and I made a quick trip to Moscow to find out if my interest could
be matched on the Soviet side. As had been the case with the Task
Force to Prevent Terrorism, I knew that a successful initiative would
require the right Soviet partner. In Moscow I talked with a number of
people about whether the project was achievable, and if so, what
would be the best organization with which to work. In the end, I
joined forces with the Middle East department of the Institute of
World Economy and International Relations of the Soviet Academy
of Sciences. This institute, which had been headed by Yevgeni
Primakov who would subsequently become Russia’s prime minister,
agreed to cosponsor the task force and to choose ten prominent
Soviets to be part of it. We agreed that participants should be people
who were nominally unofficial but who had access to policymakers.
Next, I went back to Washington, D.C. and put together a
comparable American team of ten Middle East specialists. In
November 1990, I returned to Moscow with the Americans. At the
first session, something happened that changed the nature of the
project. The group had begun to engage when William Quandt,
former director of Middle East Affairs of the U.S. National Security
Council, stated convincingly that the idea of the United States and
the USSR working together in Lebanon would not be effective—not
because the two countries could not cooperate but because the
Lebanese civil war was inextricably tied to other conflicts in the
Middle East. He noted that peace in Lebanon required a regional
approach. He pointed out that the parties in Lebanon’s civil war had
sponsors both inside and outside the region. After considerable
discussion, participants agreed that the project should take on a
wider Middle East approach and that its the name should be
changed to the U.S.-Soviet Task Force on the Middle East and
Lebanon. There was a shared feeling that it was time to explore new
approaches. In the end, the group recommended that the USSR and
the United States should convene under UN auspices an ongoing
Track 1 process for the Middle East similar to the 1975 Helsinki
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now
OSCE)¸ which provided a framework for reducing East-West
tensions.
After returning to the United States, I briefed Allen Grossman, my
board chair, on what had happened in Moscow. I told him about our
plan for Search to become an advocate for an official,
intergovernmental, CSCE-type process. However, he misunderstood
what I was proposing. He thought I was saying that we at Search
would convene an unofficial Track 2 process for regional cooperation
in the Middle East. My first impulse was to correct him, but I quickly
realized that, at least from Search’s perspective, the premise at the
heart of his misunderstanding—to work unofficially—would be a
better approach than what the task force had proposed in Moscow.
Lobbying the superpowers to establish an official CSCE-type
process was not in itself a bad idea, but it was outside Search’s skill
set; whereas holding unofficial Track 2 meetings within a CSCE-like
regional framework would be consistent with our strongest suit. Thus
I decided to make a change in strategy. Instead of lobbying
governments to set up an official Track 1 structure, we Searchers
would ourselves launch a shadow CSCE process on an unofficial
Track 2 level.
Even though this particular change worked out well, readers
should not think that moving ahead on the basis of a
misunderstanding is necessarily a key part of social
entrepreneurship. The lesson here is that social entrepreneurs need
to be prepared to take advantage of new opportunities, no matter
how they arise. And if social entrepreneurs are not deeply engaged,
they are likely to miss these chances.
My colleagues and I were able to frame what we had in mind by
saying it would be like CSCE—but for the Middle East. Our target
audience in the foreign policy and funding communities easily
understood this metaphor.
Although the CSCE process had worked very well in Europe, we
knew that our unofficial structure would have to reflect both the
realities of the Middle East and our organizational limitations. Our
idea was to create a core group that brought together a wide variety
of people from across the region: retired generals, human rights
activists, business executives, editors, and conflict resolution
experts. Not only would these people engage in dialogue, but they
would also work together on joint action projects. In addition, we
hoped to chronicle and promote regional cooperation by publishing a
quarterly newsletter. We knew that CSCE had existed for about
fifteen years before it had become effective in improving East-West
relations. We anticipated our process might take at least that long
and would involve numerous meetings.
Once we had decided on the project’s basic approach, the next
step was to find funding. That was not easy to do with an initiative
unlike anything that had ever been tried in the Middle East. However,
in the same way that an unexpected event—the build-up to the Gulf
War—had contributed to the success of our U.S.-Soviet Task Force
to Prevent Terrorism, our Middle East work received a boost from
another event we had not anticipated—the outbreak of the Gulf War
itself. We were once again ahead of the curve because our project’s
core elements had been developed before the war had even begun.
As much as my colleagues and I detested war and the resulting loss
of life, the Gulf War turned out to be a boon for us: it validated the
idea that the region was in need of a comprehensive, CSCE-type
process. Although we did not fully understand this at the time, our
timing was impeccable.
Events played out as follows. Our Moscow meeting on Lebanon
and the Middle East took place in November 1990, and the Gulf War
began about six weeks later in January 1991. By the end of February
the fighting had ended, and my colleagues and I had already written
most of our proposal. However, nothing was yet in concrete, and we
were agile enough to make revisions that reflected the evolving state
of the region. By this point in our organizational life, we had learned
how important it was to use donors’ favorite buzz words and to frame
proposals in language that spoke directly to their needs and
preferences—while still maintaining the integrity of the project.
Instead of emphasizing that our aim was to promote regional
cooperation, which it continued to be, we stressed that this was an
effort to help restore peace in the region, which it also was.
Because the project was now regional in nature, concentrating on
Lebanon seemed to make little sense, so we changed the proposal
to eliminate our focus on that country. Also, with the Cold War
waning and Soviet influence in the Middle East lessening, a U.S.-
Soviet approach, which had previously seemed crucial, no longer felt
necessary. So we dropped the Soviet involvement and renamed the
project the Initiative for Peace and Cooperation in the Middle East.
Our operating strategy became to complement, supplement, and, on
occasion, anticipate official negotiations in the region.
These changes made the proposal more yesable, and we
received our first ever six-figure grants from the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the W.
Alton Jones Foundation. These grants enabled us to begin an
innovative new project, and they also improved our chances of
receiving heftier contributions from other donors. Most funders are
reluctant to make larger donations than those the organization has
already received. In our case, bigger sums started to flow in once we
had cracked the six-figure barrier.
 With the money in hand to launch the project, we set about
choosing twenty-five Middle Easterners to be members of the
Initiative’s Core Working Group. We were looking for influential
thinkers who were also action-oriented. These Arabs, Israelis,
Iranians, and Turks were to be at the heart of our process. We
planned to establish a forum in which Middle Easterners would meet,
not as adversaries but as colleagues. Participants would share
superordinate goals and work together to resolve common problems.
In addition, we recognized that in the Middle East, as in other
regions, Track 2 work with influential participants often required at
least the tacit approval of top level Track 1 officials. Armed with
introductions from our various contacts, the executive director of the
Initiative, retired Ambassador Peter Constable, and I traveled to the
region to hold meetings with leaders of the Egyptian, Israeli, and
Jordanian governments. Another colleague connected with top
officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The basic
question we asked of the people with whom we met was not how to
make peace in the region but what well-placed people would they
recommend for participation in confidential, unofficial talks?
In the abstract, the Initiative and its Core Working Group seemed
like a great idea. As we began, however, we did not know if it would
actually work. Would high-level, unofficial, Middle Easterners agree
to get involved—and stay involved for long periods of time? And, if
so, would they be able to accomplish anything?
We got our initial answer in Rome in September 1991 at the first
Core Working Group meeting, when participants met for three days
at the airport Holiday Inn. As much as I would have preferred a hotel
with more ambiance, we wanted to avoid calling attention to what we
were doing, and a grand hotel in the center of Rome would have
been considerably less private—not to mention more expensive. In
addition, we were concerned about security, as was the Italian
government with which we were in close contact. After all, in those
days before official Middle Eastern talks had begun in Madrid, there
were people in the world—and there still are—who did not think
Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, and Turks should be consorting with each
other and who might have reacted violently if they knew what we
were doing. As a result, Italian authorities provided us with security in
the form of a Carabinieri, who wielded a submachine gun, wore
striped pants and a plumed hat, and guarded the door of our meeting
room. I am not sure that we needed this protection, but it was better
to be safe than sorry—and his armed presence did add a certain
seriousness to the gathering.
Inside the meeting room, the tone was set early when an Arab
participant—almost reflexively—began to criticize a right-wing Israeli
general who was sitting near him. As the tension mounted, a
Lebanese participant who had fought with the PLO against Israeli
forces walked across the room, put his arm around the Israeli
general whom he might have once faced in battle, and declared, “He
is my friend.” At that point, the group seemed to let out a collective
sigh of relief, and the atmosphere shifted.
We knew that we wanted to avoid the win-lose, polemical
approach that was so common in the Middle East—and in so many
places. We realized that sessions needed to be interesting and
productive; otherwise participants would not make the significant
commitment of time that we felt would be necessary. We hoped our
meetings would provide a prototype for future regional cooperation,
and we understood full well that the process we employed to run
these meetings was likely to be as important as the substance of
what was discussed.
As we had done with the terrorism project, we brought in a
professional facilitator. We understood that using a facilitator—as
opposed to having a senior person act as the chair and call on
people who raise their hands—was not usually part of international
gatherings. Nevertheless, we decided to utilize a culturally sensitive
facilitator both to moderate the proceedings and to help structure the
overall process. We enlisted Marc Sarkady, a corporate consultant in
the organizational development field. To his credit, he agreed to work
with us on a pro bono basis.
At the Rome meeting, participants were initially mystified by
Sarkady’s role. One participant even quipped that he thought a
facilitator was a kind of enema. Nonetheless, most of the participants
quickly came to like the process, and Sarkady became a rallying
point for group cohesiveness. Participants tended to see him as the
guardian of a level playing field, particularly between Palestinians
and Israelis. When there was a breakdown in the discussion, or
when something was not understood, or even when someone’s body
language indicated unhappiness, Sarkady spent considerable time
setting things right. He explained concepts such as active listening,
and participants started paying attention with an intensity that was
very different from the empty stares that were so often the norm at
meetings of Middle Easterners.
One participant, a well-known Egyptian human rights activist,
later related how he briefed his wife and kids on the Rome meeting
after he came home. Among other things he described active
listening, which to him was a new and exciting concept. One of his
teenage sons took it all in and then asked, “Dad, does that mean that
now you have to listen to us?”
The meetings began with hard-headed, policy-oriented
discussions. However, friendships quickly formed across national
lines, and people found that they genuinely liked each other.
Participants arrived on time and asked for longer sessions. There
was remarkable frankness, a willingness to work through obstacles,
a determination to try out new ideas, and a commitment to results.
As stereotypes were broken down, many participants felt they were
part of something historic. They agreed on a set of operating
principles and formed a series of working groups to deal with
pressing issues.
On the substantive level, there were unique aspects to the
meetings. First, we included right-wing Israelis. Most previous
meetings of Arabs and Israelis had involved only dovish Israelis who
reflected a limited perspective. Most of the Arabs had never met an
Israeli hawk. Second, Saudis and Gulf Arabs sat together with
Israelis (and talked amiably in the corridors and over meals).
Although this has since become relatively commonplace, at the time
it was revolutionary.
There were some wonderful moments, such as when Israelis and
Gulf Arabs discovered that they shared common ground on at least
one point: How to make sure that the American government kept its
promises. Or when Arab and Israeli human rights campaigners
decided in a breakout session to launch a regional campaign to
prevent torture and to protect activists like themselves. Previously,
the Core Working Group as a whole had decided that all new
activities required the approval—or at least not the disapproval—of
all the participants. And in the face of this announcement about
human rights, there were two dissenters: both were former generals,
one Egyptian and the other Israeli. They made exactly the same
argument. They wanted everyone to understand that of course they
opposed human rights abuses, but they felt that if the Initiative got
deeply involved with such issues, the region’s governments would
oppose all of its activities. Then a Kuwaiti who had survived torture
by his Iraqi captors declared with passion that if the Initiative could
not take a stand against torture he was not interested in being
involved. He was supported by an Israeli human rights activist. In the
end, the two generals relented. They said that they did not want their
objections to jeopardize the initiative as a whole and, particularly,
their involvement in the Security Working Group. This was the first
time participants had ever seen Israelis and Arabs arguing on both
sides of an issue—which was a breakthrough in its own terms.
At the end of the Rome gathering, several attendees stated that
they had never before attended a meeting at which so much was
accomplished, and they requested that future sessions include
training in facilitation. We said we would provide this for participants
who agreed to come early.
During the next dozen years, we held scores of additional
meetings, workshops, trainings, and other gatherings. Participants
wrote papers, articles, and books together. They sponsored regional
campaigns, appeared together on the BBC, attacked stereotypes,
went on wilderness trips, and generally achieved a remarkable set of
accomplishments.
One of my favorite memories that embodies the initiative’s overall
spirit occurred in Amman, Jordan. After a meeting of the Security
Working Group, participants piled into taxis to go to dinner at a
restaurant across town. By chance, I found myself in a cab with three
others: Mohammad Mahallati, an Iranian; Ze’ev Schiff, an Israeli; and
Ismat Kittani, an Iraqi. I was in the back seat chatting away in
English with my Iranian and Israeli friends, and Kittani was in the
front talking to the driver in Arabic. As Kittani later recounted, the
driver asked him who we were and what we were doing in Amman.
Kittani replied that the three people in the back were Mahallati, the
former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations; Schiff, the dean of
Israeli journalists; and me, an American who headed an NGO. Kittani
added that he was an Iraqi who had been president of the UN
General Assembly. The driver was incredulous. “And all this is
happening in my cab!” he exclaimed.
To my mind, this taxi provided a model for exactly what my
colleagues and I wanted to see across the Middle East. Our vision
was to expand what was happening in that taxi to the region as a
whole. Unfortunately, this vision has not yet been realized—and it is
not even close today. Still, the Initiative had some extraordinary
accomplishments.

• In 1993–94, before official peace talks had begun between

Jordan and Israel, we sponsored back-channel meetings
between former generals from both countries. Together they
worked out a series of unofficial understandings that needed to
be dealt with in future official negotiations between Israel and
Jordan. After each of their meetings, the results were quickly
passed on to the prime minister of Israel and the king of Jordan.
These unofficial formulations demonstrated that there could be
agreements consistent with the mutual interests of both
countries, and many of their specific ideas became part of the
eventual Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty that was signed in
October 1994. We were about six months ahead of the official
negotiations, which proved to be about right.
• For eighteen months during 1993 and 1994, we sponsored
unofficial talks between Israelis and Syrians on security issues
involving the Golan Heights. These talks laid the groundwork for
official Syrian-Israeli negotiations. However, we were forced to
stop after the existence of the meetings was leaked to the press
in Israel, and the Syrian government, which had been kept in the
loop from the beginning, denied any knowledge of the talks. This
Syrian reaction was reminiscent of the scene in the classic movie
 Casablanca when the Claude Rains character says he is
“shocked, shocked” to hear that gambling is going on.
• In 2002, we established the Middle East Consortium for
Infectious Disease Surveillance (MECIDS) to bring together
public health officials and academics from Israel, Jordan, and
Palestine. With the goal of promoting cooperation to reduce the
threat from contagious diseases, the project operated from the
premises that germs do not stop at checkpoints; that cross-
border detection, reporting, and data collection are crucial; and
that infectious disease surveillance is virtually identical to
biological warfare surveillance. (When ten people simultaneously
develop flu symptoms, their governments must determine if this
was a natural occurrence, or if the germs were manufactured in a
laboratory.) We have managed to keep MECIDS operating for
more than twenty years—from the time of avian flu through
COVID-19—largely because it has stuck to professional issues
and stayed out of politics.
• We regularly convened the Middle East’s top editors and
broadcast executives. The idea was to encourage reporting that
did not inflame conflict; that reduced stereotyping; and that
humanized the other. As a result, Israeli and Arab media
professionals were often able to work collaboratively and
exchange information in moments of crisis.
• We started the Common Ground News Service, which published
articles from 2005 to 2013 on key issues affecting Muslim-
Western relations. Its articles were reprinted roughly 40,000
times in newspapers and websites in the region and around the
world.
• Under the chairmanship of former World Bank head and U.S.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, we convened two
gatherings of Arab, Israeli, and Turkish business leaders. Again,
we were ahead of the curve because soon thereafter the U.S.
government began holding similar meetings as part of its Middle
East peace process. When that happened, we suspended our
meetings because we chose to work only in areas in which we
did not duplicate the efforts of others.
 On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four
airliners, two of which they crashed into the twin towers of New York
City’s World Trade Center, killing nearly three thousand people.
Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s leader, held the United States
responsible for its years of backing Israel against the Palestinians,
and he said this attack was revenge for that and for U.S. actions
against Muslims in the Middle East and beyond.
In the aftermath of 9/11, my wife Susan and I concluded that the
struggle between Israelis and Palestinians was the Middle East’s—
and the world’s—core conflict, even if many more people were being
killed in fighting in other places. She and I decided to de-emphasize
our regional work and to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As
professional peace builders, we felt a responsibility to be engaged
directly in trying to lessen the conflict. So in the midst of the second
intifada when Palestine and Israel were wracked by violence, Susan
and I decided to move to Jerusalem for two years.
We left management at Search’s Washington, D.C. headquarters
to our chief operating officer, Shamil Idriss, who a dozen years later
would be my successor as CEO of Search. Due to the seven-hour
time difference, we found that we could do a full day’s work in
Jerusalem and still put in considerable time—albeit remotely—in
Washington, D.C. We moved into a lovely house, the former Turkish
consulate, located seventy meters from the line that divided East and
West Jerusalem. As common grounders, we would have liked to
have shown our evenhandedness by living on the actual dividing
line, but that would have put us in the middle of a highway. We
bought produce in Palestinian East Jerusalem, where it was fresher,
and we frequented supermarkets in the Israeli part of the city that
were better stocked with packaged goods. There were no movie
theaters on the Palestinian side, but we frequented a video store
there. On weekends, we often went to the cinema at a West
Jerusalem mall where young Israeli women from the settlements
made fashion statements with miniskirts and M16 rifles. In a city
largely segregated by ethnicity, we were among the few people who
traveled back and forth freely, and we experienced the joy and pain
of both sides. Indeed, we came to agree with the late Faisal
Husseini, who said that Jerusalem would be either the “rising sun” or
the “black hole” of the Middle East. Our work in Jerusalem was to
create an environment in which the “rising sun” could emerge and
shine brightly.
While we were in Jerusalem (figure 3.2), I spent most of my time
writing and producing a four-part documentary TV series titled The
Shape of the Future, which focused on how to resolve the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. The idea was to show that there could be
workable solutions that were acceptable to most people on both
sides. The series was made almost totally in Arabic and Hebrew,
neither of which I spoke. I used simultaneous translation for the
interviews, which meant I was usually about seven seconds late in
sharing emotion with my subjects. Still I was in hog heaven, and I
reveled in the creative process. For me, personally, making this
series was probably the single most stimulating project on which I
worked during my thirty-two years at Search.
FIGURE 3.2 John Marks and Susan Collin Marks after a day’s filming in southern Israel.

Two incidents stood out during my discovery process. The first

came when I was interviewing an old Palestinian man in a refugee
camp outside Jerusalem. He had been born in a village inside what
is now Israel and had been forced to leave in 1948 during the armed
struggle that the Israelis call the “War of Independence” and the
Palestinians refer to as the “Nakba” (which means “disaster” in
Arabic). I asked the man, who still clung to a key to his old house,
whether he wanted to go back to the village he originally came from,
and he vehemently answered “yes.” Then I asked him if he would be
willing to stay in Palestine if he were to receive a large amount of
money as compensation for what he had lost, and he said “no.” Next
I asked if he would give up his right of return if Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat told him not to go back, and he again answered “no.”
Suddenly he turned the tables on me and posed a question: “Where
were you born?” I replied, “New Jersey.” He asked, “Could anything
make you give up New Jersey?” I chuckled and said that I already
had given up New Jersey and moved to Washington, D.C.
As the days passed, I realized that this exchange was certainly
not at all humorous for the old man. For a Palestinian, the place
where he was born—the stones, the olive trees—was sacred. To me
—and also to most Americans and Israelis—the country as a whole
was much more important than the specific place from which I came.
I realized that this was a fundamental difference between Israelis
and Palestinians that fueled the conflict: many Israelis believed that
the very strong Palestinian longing to return to their native villages
reflected an insatiable desire to drive the Jewish population into the
sea. With more understanding of and empathy for Palestinian
aspirations, I thought perhaps ways could be found to lessen some
of the pain and to help discover solutions for the issues that divided
these two peoples.
The second incident occurred when I went to interview a Jewish
couple in Jerusalem on a Thursday night. This was the evening
before the Jewish sabbath started. For many young Israelis who
usually had the next day off, it was a time to party. While I was
waiting for my interview subjects in their living room, their son
entered and we started to talk. He was a soldier on active duty
whose main task was protecting Jewish settlers in Hebron on the
West Bank. He had been given leave for shabbat, and he was
dressed in fancy clothes for a night on the town. In a nonprovocative
way, I asked him how he liked his duty in Hebron, and he blurted out,
“I am ashamed of some of the things I have seen and done.”
I did not follow up because I had come to interview the parents,
not the son. After a few minutes, they came into the room, and the
son said goodnight and went off to a club. After he left, I told the
father what I had heard from his son, and I asked for his reaction.
The father replied that the young man had not meant what he said.
“He’s a good boy, and he wouldn’t do bad things,” stated the father.
 To me, this was an extraordinary example of denial—denying
what his own son had said only minutes before. During our two years
in Jerusalem, I found that this type of denial was typical of how
many, if not most, Israelis viewed their occupation of Palestine.
In 2005, the four Shape of the Future documentary programs I
wrote and produced were broadcast on the same nights on Israeli,
Palestinian, and Abu Dhabi TV. Such a cross-border simulcast had
never happened before, and I was pleased with the final product,
which is still available on Amazon.com two decades later. As former
President Jimmy Carter said:

This documentary series examines the fears and aspirations of Israelis and
Palestinians in an even-handed way. It shows how a negotiated agreement could
address those fears and aspirations without threatening the national existence of
either side. Israel and Egypt were able to accomplish this task at Camp David
more than 25 years ago, and this series supports the belief that Israelis and
Palestinians can do the same.

After two years in Jerusalem, Susan and I went home to

Washington, D.C., and we were succeeded as program directors in
Jerusalem by former assistant secretary of state Robert Pelletreau
and his wife Pamela. They were followed by John Bell, a former
Canadian diplomat. All of these directors (including us) were
expatriates from outside the region, and by choosing them we
avoided showing a preference for either Palestinians or Israelis.
However, in 2010 we made a big leap and named an Israeli, Sharon
Rosen, and a Palestinian, Suheir Rasul, to be codirectors (figure
3.3). For the next ten years, they were partners and friends—two
mothers working together for peace between their two peoples.
Rosen came originally from the UK; Rasul was born in the USA.
They had both returned to the Holy Land, which they considered to
be their homeland, and they completely supported the right of the
other to be there. For me, their relationship demonstrated what was
possible—but certainly has never been achieved—between their two
peoples. If only this kind of connection could be extended across the
entire region!
FIGURE 3.3 Codirectors Suheir Rasul (left) and Sharon Rosen (right) outside Search’s
office in Jerusalem in 2010.

Having been engaged in the Middle East for more than thirty
years, I have seen—and acted upon—all sorts of possibilities.
Although most of our projects were successful on their own terms,
what we did was obviously not sufficient to achieve our overarching
vision of regional peace. The reality is that the Middle East is further
away from peace today than it was three decades ago when our
involvement started. The question arises: Was it worth the effort?
I answer with an emphatic “yes.” Perhaps things would be worse
if we had not been involved. We will never know. Our efforts helped
maintain threads of connection between Israelis, Arabs, and
Iranians. We were promoting the idea that there is a better way to
resolve conflicts than the violent win-lose and lose-lose approaches
that have prevailed for so long in the region. We and many others
with whom we shared values provided a framework for an eventual
end to the conflict—and all conflicts do end at some point. Perhaps
our greatest contribution was to help keep hope alive.

OceanofPDF.com
 4
Keep Showing Up

I
t has been said that 80 percent of success is showing up.
Principle #4 of social entrepreneurship is “keep showing up.” It
simply does not work to dabble in a project—or to parachute into
a conflict—and then to pull out shortly thereafter without leaving
behind a replacement or a whole team. In 1996, Search launched an
initiative to try to improve U.S. relations with Iran, and that effort
continued for twenty-five years. This project is a prime example of
the operational benefits of continuing to show up.
Social entrepreneurs should be willing to make long-term
commitments to all of their projects, but I found that showing up was
particularly important in working with Iranians who tend to look at the
world in terms of centuries and millennia. Even after Search became
a multilayered organization with hundreds of employees, I stayed
personally involved in our Iran work. I knew full well that
management experts would advise the president of an organization
of our size and complexity not to function as the desk officer for an
individual project, and I understood the importance of delegating.
However, by working in a direct way on the Iran project, I avoided
being overwhelmed by the administrative demands of my job.
Moreover, Ambassador Bill Miller, my partner in carrying out
Search’s effort to improve U.S.-Iranian relations, was one of my
oldest and most treasured friends. I absolutely loved being able to
shut my office door, put aside questions of finance and logistics, and
conspire with Miller about how to move our Iran project forward.
Indeed, I would counsel all social entrepreneurs that they will be
more effective leaders if they retain some hands-on working-level
functions.
Our work with Iran emerged directly from our sponsorship of the
Initiative for Peace and Cooperation in the Middle East. Mohammad
Jafar “Amir” Mahallati, the former Iranian ambassador to the UN,
was a member of that project’s Core Working Group. Previously,
Mahallati had played a key role in negotiating an end to the Iran-Iraq
War. The talks he had helped start eventually were successful, but
he began the peace process before Iran’s leaders were ready for
meaningful negotiations. As a result, he had been removed from his
UN post, which effectively ended his diplomatic career.
By 1994, Mahallati had become a regular participant in our
Middle Eastern meetings, and he was impressed by the process we
employed. He described his reaction this way: “For the first time, I
experienced a kind of atmosphere—a kind of spirit—in a conference,
in a gathering, which permits people to open themselves up without
reservation and speak out of their hearts.”
At one of our sessions in Marrakesh, Mahallati took me aside and
suggested that Search sponsor Track 2 sessions between Iranians
and Americans that were similar to what we were doing with our
Middle Eastern project. He thought such meetings might cut through
the mistrust that pervaded the U.S.-Iranian relationship and bring the
two countries closer together. I was initially horrified by this idea. The
Iran hostage crisis remained fresh in my mind, and I must confess
that I still held a stereotypical view of Iranians. I knew that Mahallati’s
father was the Grand Ayatollah of Shiraz. Probably, like many
Americans, deep down I thought all ayatollahs were religious
fanatics who exhorted their followers to shout “death to America.” But
when I met Mahallati’s dad, an actual ayatollah, my stereotype
melted away. He turned out to be a wonderfully wise man with an
impish smile and a lovely personality. In my view, he embodied
everything a man of God should be.
Mahallati and I gradually built up enough trust to become real
friends. A year after he made his proposal, I agreed to be his
American partner in setting up Track 2 meetings. At the same time, I
kept in mind Ronald Reagan’s old adage: “Trust but verify.” And I
must say that since that time more than a quarter century ago when
Mahallati and I agreed to work together, I never have had reason to
mistrust him.
Mahallati did not have an organization behind him, but he
became Search’s partner and recruited the Iranian participants for
our working group. They included professors and a Foreign Ministry
official supposedly acting in his private capacity. We were pleased to
have a Track 1 man involved in what we had foreseen would be a
Track 2 process. His presence meant that at least some parts of the
Iranian government—albeit relatively moderate ones—were probably
going to pay attention and that the results of our meetings were likely
to reach into official circles.
At Search we created a planning team that included me, my wife
Susan, and William Kirby, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary
of state who was then heading our Middle East program. We were
particularly interested in including Americans who had connections to
current policymakers, and we enrolled in our effort a distinguished
group that included a former assistant secretary of state, former
National Security Council officials, a conservative think tanker, a
professor, and retired ambassadors—one of whom, Bruce Laingen,
had been the senior American diplomat held hostage after the 1979
seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Nevertheless, a well-known retired U.S. ambassador refused to
participate and warned that we were putting Search at risk by
meeting with Iranians. He said that such a project could result in our
losing access to U.S. government funds and that, in any case, the
time was not right for what we were trying to do. I noted—although I
did not say this to the ambassador—that the time never seemed to
be right to try to improve relations with Iran. In any case, we decided
that the importance of our cause justified the risks involved in moving
ahead. We felt we had an opening that should be pursued.
Planning was complicated. We had to figure out where to hold
the meetings and how to pay for them. We needed to find a location
where participants would feel safe to talk freely. We understood that
the process probably required some level of government
involvement because Iranian participants would require visas to
enter most countries, and only a cooperative government could
guarantee that the necessary entry permits would be issued. That
ruled out holding the sessions in the United States or in Iran—neither
of which was likely to support what we had in mind.
Sweden, which then had a long history of neutrality, seemed like
an excellent choice. Its Foreign Ministry was already financing
another Search program on regional Middle Eastern security, so we
had an existing relationship in place along with a good track record. I
approached a high official of the Swedish Foreign Ministry and asked
for funding, visa support, and an isolated site where participants
could meet and not be disturbed. After checking at the highest level,
he responded that his ministry would back us—but only if the U.S.
government did not object. He confided that his minister wanted to
make sure there would be no damage to the country’s relationship
with the United States if Sweden hosted our process. The Swedes
feared that our meetings might create a rift like the one that had
developed during the Vietnam War when Prime Minister Olaf Palme
strongly opposed U.S. policy and further alienated American officials
by appearing in a widely viewed film, I am Curious (Yellow), which
was perceived as both antiwar and pornographic.
We recognized that the Clinton administration would be unlikely
to go on the record to communicate officially that it approved our
meetings, so we asked a high State Department official if he would
be willing to telephone his Swedish counterpart and informally
provide a green light. We never knew if this official cleared the idea
with any of his colleagues, but he did make the call and told the
Swedes that the U.S. government would have no objection if we
went ahead. That did the trick, and the Swedes came on board.
To make it easier to justify the funding to its parliamentary
watchdogs, the Swedish Foreign Ministry stipulated that the grant
would need to be given to a Swedish institute that then would pass
the money on to us. We had no problem with this arrangement, and
we quickly formed a working partnership with the Life & Peace
Institute of Uppsala, Sweden. As for a place to meet, a Swedish
official recommended an isolated country inn in Sjövillan, a hamlet
not far from the Stockholm airport. Not only did the inn provide a
beautiful setting on the edge of a lake, but we also had the whole
place to ourselves, which was important in maintaining the
confidentiality of our sessions. The Sjövillan innkeeper turned into
the godmother of our talks, and she took impeccable care of us.
Our Iranian participants were particularly insistent that the
existence of the meetings should be kept secret. They knew that just
talking to Americans, if discovered by the wrong people, could put
them in physical danger. Thus, from the beginning, our participants
needed to have faith in the good intentions of the others.
Despite our desire to work confidentially, we knew U.S.
intelligence agencies would be likely to find out that we were meeting
with Iranians, so we felt it would be wise to informally brief key
people in the State Department and the White House. None of our
interlocutors inside the U.S. government told us not to hold the
meetings. In fact, almost everyone to whom we talked asked to be
kept informed.
We held the first meeting in May 1996, and we were able to read
a message to participants from President Bill Clinton. Although the
message had no real substance, except to wish the participants well,
it sent a signal to the Iranians that the White House was aware of
what was happening and that the American participants were serious
about finding ways to improve relations.
The meetings were facilitated by Susan Collin Marks, who
possessed rare talents in making people feel comfortable and getting
them to yes. We wanted the facilitation to provide an aura of
impartiality, so we introduced Susan as a South African (which she
was) and therefore neither an Iranian nor an American. To her credit,
Susan quickly created an atmosphere that enabled participants to
connect with each other. She guided the group past the stereotyping
and demonization of the sort that had made me initially wary of
Mahallati. Participants interacted on an equal and respectful basis.
We did our utmost to be culturally sensitive. We knew that the
Iranian participants would not, as good Muslims, drink alcohol, so
our first impulse was not to serve any alcoholic beverages at meals
or even at the opening reception. But one of our American
participants, a conservative think tanker, said that not being able to
drink wine with his dinner discriminated against him. We queried the
Iranians, and they agreed it would be fine to give this man a carafe
of wine at meals even though everyone else was served juice and
water. That solved the problem.
Knowing that most Iranians have a particular fondness for poetry,
we started meetings with readings by the famed Persian poet Rumi
and by Robert Frost, whose Road Not Taken seemed especially
appropriate to those of us who wanted to move U.S.-Iranian relations
down a new path. And we followed the maxim that had guided us in
earlier sessions with Soviets and Middle Easterners. Instead of
participants facing each other across the table as adversaries, they
sat together and took on a shared problem: How to improve relations
between the United States and Iran.
Susan had a cofacilitator—the Lebanese man who had put his
arm around an Israeli general and declared him to be a friend at our
first Middle Eastern meeting. This man spoke fluent Farsi, and he
was the grandson of a famous Iranian ayatollah. One of his key roles
was to find out from Iranian participants if and when they had
problems with the process. During breaks he would walk around the
nearby lake with them, and they would let him know what, if
anything, was bothering them. They understood he was passing on
what they said to Susan and our team, but they seemed to prefer
talking to this man in Farsi rather than complaining directly to us in
English. For instance, the Iranians told him that the process seemed
to be one-sided because the Americans were asking most of the
questions and the Iranians were mainly providing answers. The
Iranians did not feel that the playing field was level, and they were
not learning as much from the Americans as the Americans were
learning from them. This had not been apparent to the U.S.
participants who were simply curious about life and politics inside
Iran, which had been mostly closed to them in the years since the
country’s 1979 revolution.
Clearly this perceived inequality needed to be rectified, so the
American participants came up with a creative solution that was
dubbed the Paula Jones briefing. At that time, Paula Jones was in
the headlines for having claimed to have had an affair with President
Bill Clinton, and our briefing was a gossipy way of providing the
Iranians with what seemed to be the inside scoop on what was
happening in Washington, D.C. It gave the Iranians juicy material on
which they could dine out back in Tehran, even though they had to
keep their participation at the meetings secret.
Each meeting lasted three days, and during the first thirteen
months we had three meetings. Participants got to know each other,
and friendships were born that exist to this day. At the third meeting,
participants reached consensus around a grand bargain for
improving relations. Included were ways to deal with issues related
to frozen assets, expropriated property, security, narcotics, and
culture. Participants felt good that they had been able to identify
what they considered to be large areas of agreement. Thus they
were subsequently disappointed when they went home and found
that the policymakers in both governments were unreceptive to the
compromises the group had laboriously worked out.
In Track 2 diplomacy, a rejection of this sort is called a reentry
problem. It occurs when unofficial negotiators such as our
participants get too far ahead of what their official counterparts are
willing to accept. In fact, negotiators have been killed because they
agreed to proposals that were unacceptable to their base back
home. Fortunately, our participants received only a not now reaction
as opposed to a violent one.
Nevertheless, because of the lack of official buy-in, participants
were dispirited when they came back to Sweden in January 1998 for
the fourth meeting. Then one of the Iranians, an inventive professor,
proposed a different approach. He suggested that the time might be
ripe for Americans to return to Tehran, where they had not openly
appeared since the U.S. Embassy was seized almost twenty years
earlier. He noted that the presence of any Americans who came to
Iran would be heavily criticized by hard-liners, but those who would
be criticized the least would be wrestlers. Why wrestlers? In Iranian
folklore, wrestlers are the great mythic heroes. They are, in essence,
the samurai of Iran, and wrestling remains the most popular sport
with the masses.
My colleagues and I were intrigued. We quickly recognized that
sports might provide a good way to start bridging the gap between
Iran and the United States, and that wrestling diplomacy might
become the equivalent of what ping-pong diplomacy had been a
quarter-century earlier between the United States and China. Taking
American wrestlers to Iran seemed like a plausible, culturally
appropriate means of moving forward without directly confronting the
heart of the conflict. Our process had hit an obstacle, and wrestling
diplomacy seemed to offer a path around it. Setbacks in
peacemaking—as in life—do not justify giving up. Rather, they call
for finding alternative routes forward.
Although I am an avid sports fan, I knew virtually nothing about
wrestling. Nevertheless, I was willing to give it a try. After returning to
Washington, D.C., I managed to make contact with USA Wrestling,
America’s national wrestling federation. I learned that it had
previously received an invitation to send a team to Tehran to take
part in a major tournament called the Takhti Cup, but that it was
inclined not to accept. I quickly realized that my best option would be
to convince USA Wrestling to compete in the tournament.
I discovered that the main barrier to participation for USA
Wrestling had little to do with Iran or wrestling—and much to do with
what had happened two years earlier when the organization had
been widely criticized for taking several million dollars in
contributions from John du Pont, a very rich wrestling aficionado and
an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune. For the previous decade, du
Pont had provided training and resident facilities for America’s best
wrestlers at Foxcatcher, his estate in rural Pennsylvania. Then in
1996, for reasons that have never been clear, he had shot and killed
Dave Schultz, an Olympic gold medal–winning wrestler who had
lived and coached at Foxcatcher. Subsequently, USA Wrestling had
been accused of negligence because it had ignored du Pont’s
mental problems and put the wrestlers at risk in order to access du
Pont’s money and state of the art facilities. (This sordid tale of du
Pont and the wrestlers was the subject of the 2014 Academy Award–
nominated film Foxcatcher.)
Given this history, it was clear to me that the key to getting the
leaders of USA Wrestling to agree to send their team to Iran was to
convince them that the wrestlers would be safe and that no one
would be criticized for endangering the wrestlers. That brought out
my chutzpah—a Yiddish word meaning nerve or gall that is
characteristic of most social entrepreneurs (see chapter 10)—and I
offered USA Wrestling a partnership in which we at Search would
look after the security and the politics, and USA Wrestling would take
care of the wrestling.
USA Wrestling began to come around after I heard from State
Department officials that they had “no objection” to the American
wrestlers traveling to Iran. In diplomat speak, this meant that State
gave its tacit approval while maintaining official separation. In
addition, I arranged a meeting between USA Wrestling’s leadership
and the Iranian ambassador to the UN, at which the ambassador
provided assurances that, as guests in Iran, the wrestlers would be
completely safe. I also secured the support of the Swiss government,
which represented U.S. interests in Iran. As a final touch, I provided
USA Wrestling officials with the private phone number of the Swiss
ambassador in Tehran and assured them that he would provide
assistance in case of trouble. All of these efforts had the desired
effect, and the leaders of USA Wrestling decided not only to send the
team but also to go to Iran themselves.
Wrestling is a minor sport in America, and USA Wrestling officials
told me they hoped that a high-visibility appearance in Iran would
help make it into a major one. They believed the visit would attract
considerable attention because it would be the first time in nearly
twenty years that an American team in any sport had competed in
Iran. They felt that the trip offered a way to popularize their sport.
Doing so was not my top priority, although I certainly did not object to
it. My main motive for organizing the trip was to improve relations
between the United States and Iran. USA Wrestling and I were
backing the same initiative for different reasons, which is often the
case among people who are working together.
Once again, we were blessed with fortuitous timing. A month
before the wrestlers left for Tehran, Iran’s newly elected president,
Mohammad Khatami, gave an interview to CNN in which he called
for a “dialogue of civilizations” between Iran and the West. That
made our initiative even more relevant, and my colleagues and I
realized we now had a larger context within which wrestling
diplomacy could move forward. With the wind in our sails, I flew off
with Bill Kirby to Tehran to join the wrestlers. I had been issued an
Iranian entry visa as an official. Obviously, I was not an official in the
governmental sense. The Iranians admitted me as an official of the
sort who pounds the mat and shouts “one, two, three” at wrestling
matches.
The American wrestlers who went to Iran had more authentic
credentials. They included a former Olympic champion and two
former world champions, and they turned out to be extraordinary
people—as both sportsmen and citizen diplomats (figure 4.1).
Having reached the peak in their sport, they were delighted to have a
chance to make history. When they arrived in Tehran, two hundred
reporters met them at the airport. They had never before been in a
country where they were idolized because they were wrestlers. One
of them said that now he thought he understood how it felt to be
Michael Jordan and to play basketball in Chicago for the Bulls.

FIGURE 4.1 Former World and Olympic Champion Kevin Jackson, John Marks, and
former World Champion Melvin Douglas III in Tehran.
 Mahallati met me in Tehran and showed me around (figure 4.2).
Among other places, he took me to Tehran’s central bazaar where I
bought a small rug that still rests on the floor of my office. He and I
ate lunch at a famous restaurant in the middle of the bazaar. We sat
at a long, communal table to which merchants came to take their
meals. Mahallati ordered Iranian delicacies and translated for me.
Each time a new shopkeeper or trader sat down, he introduced me
as an American. Admittedly, I was exposed to a very small sample of
Iranians, but I was amazed by how pleased they were to meet me. In
my view, their welcome went well beyond politeness, and I heard not
a trace of anti-American rhetoric. When I said I had come with the
American wrestling team, several people said, “It’s about time.”

FIGURE 4.2 Washington Post reporter Kenneth Cooper, John Marks, Amir Mahallati, and
Bill Kirby at the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini Mausoleum in Tehran.

The following day at the sports arena, the crowd greeted the U.S.
wrestlers with similar warmth. There was heavy media coverage,
and most of the newspaper, TV, and radio pieces focused on the
return of Americans to Iran and the fact that the American flag was
being openly displayed. Bringing the flag back to Iran was one of the
major successes of our initiative. Although this had not been part of
my initial to-do list, it was another example of how unforeseen results
were often as important as the expected ones.
Here is what happened. Several days before the wrestlers were
scheduled to leave for Tehran, I received a call from a USA Wrestling
official. He asked if the wrestlers should take American flags with
them. I hadn’t thought about it, so I did what any good mediator
would do, I deflected his question with a question: Did American
wrestlers normally show the flag when they competed in international
tournaments? The official answered that the flag was usually
displayed whenever and wherever the national team competed. In
my new role as a wrestling advisor, I then recommended that the
team bring flags but only display them if the Iranians did not object.
When we got to Tehran, the Iranians had no problem with the
American flag being flown. I wrote later in the Los Angeles Times,
“The American flag returned to Iran last week with honor, without
chauvinism, and in an atmosphere of mutual respect.”
The reappearance of the flag in Tehran became a major part of
the story (figures 4.3 and 4.4). It fit perfectly with our evolving
strategy of using wrestling diplomacy as a first step in improving
U.S.-Iranian relations. For a new reality to take hold, I believed
Americans needed to update and reframe their memories of the
hostage crisis when hostile Iranian mobs repeatedly burned the flag.
That image was deeply seared into America’s collective
consciousness. I wanted to expose a mass audience to very different
pictures—of strong, proud American and Iranian athletes marching
together behind the flag and even hugging each other. Because the
global media showed up in large numbers in Tehran and the Iranians
overwhelmingly welcomed the wrestlers, tens of millions of people
were able to view these images of what might be possible.
FIGURE 4.3 The flag returns to Tehran.
FIGURE 4.4 Wrestlers embrace.

For a fundamental shift to occur in U.S.-Iranian relations, both

sides would also need to make major changes in the substance of
their policies. But substance can be profoundly affected by powerful
imagery that alters the very framework of an issue. The result can be
a transformation of perceptions (see chapter 9).
 I had never attended a defining sporting event, such as the finals
of the soccer World Cup or the baseball World Series, but for me the
1998 Takhti Cup in Tehran proved to be just that. There were 13,000
spectators packed into a 12,000-seat arena. Most had come to see
the Americans. Whenever a U.S. wrestler competed, the place
became electric. The crowd was torn between rooting for Iranians to
win and wanting to show approval of their American guests. The fans
cheered for both, although the noise seemed a little louder for the
Iranians. They roared when Zeke Jones won a silver medal and
waved the Iranian flag afterward. There was a moment of
disappointment when Kevin Jackson defeated an Iranian opponent,
but that was followed by a huge ovation when the two wrestlers
shared a long embrace. And the fans loved it when Jackson took a
victory lap around the arena, high-fiving spectators as he ran.
In the last match, Melvin Douglas III opposed Abbas Jadidi, who
had narrowly missed a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics because of
a referee’s controversial decision. The crowd kept shouting “Ja-di-di,
Ja-di-di.” He was clearly the hometown favorite. He and Douglas
faced off in an epic struggle. Neither could gain a real edge, and at
the end of regulation time, they were tied 3–3. With only a minute left
in overtime, Jadidi managed to get behind Douglas and pick up his
legs. Douglas struggled to escape. For twenty agonizing seconds
Douglas showed almost superhuman resolve in not being flipped.
Finally, Jadidi succeeded in turning over the American and won the
match. Exhausted, the wrestlers collapsed on the mat and then
quickly rose to hug each other. With their embrace, there was a huge
surge of emotion. The crowd screamed the familiar refrain, “Ja-di-di,
Ja-di-di.” But they alternated it with “Doug-las, Doug-las.”
Jadidi carried a large portrait of Iran’s first Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as he walked to the podium to accept
his medal. Douglas followed him holding a photograph of the current
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The fans roared their
support. At the beginning of the match, this same crowd had loudly
demonstrated its disapproval for Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, the defeated,
hardline presidential candidate who sat in the box of honor. Now they
appreciated Douglas’s gesture of respect toward the Islamic
Republic. (Afterward I asked Douglas how he came to carry
Khamenei’s picture. He said that Jadidi asked him to do so, and he
did not want to refuse.)
After the American wrestlers, Bill Kirby, and I had returned from
Iran, we at Search decided to make Jadidi and Douglas winners of
that year’s Common Ground Award to honor them for their
exemplary sportsmanship. Jadidi was unable to travel to
Washington, D.C. for the ceremony, but he did get to visit New York.
In front of an enthusiastic audience of Iranian-Americans in a
mosque in Queens, I presented the trophy to Jadidi and talked about
the virtues of better relations between Iran and the United States.

FIGURE 4.5 President Clinton greets John Marks and the U.S. national wrestling team as
National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (left) and wrestler Melvin Douglas (right) look on.

Douglas came to both our awards ceremony and a visit I

arranged for the wrestlers at the White House with President Clinton
(figure 4.5). The trip to the Oval Office occurred because, on a long
shot, I inquired whether the president, who was a big sports fan,
might want to meet the wrestlers. I made contact through Sandy
Berger, the president’s National Security Advisor. Berger had been a
student with me at Cornell, although I had hardly known him. Also,
his daughter and my son had been classmates at the same
elementary school in Washington, D.C., and he and I had talked a
few times at school functions. Thus he had a sense of who I was,
and I felt comfortable contacting him at the White House. When I
telephoned, I did not get through, so I left him a voicemail explaining
what I wanted. A few days later, somewhat to my surprise, I received
a call from the White House scheduling office to arrange a meeting.
If I had not been able to take advantage of my connection to Berger,
however obscure, the wrestlers and I almost certainly would not
have been invited to meet the president. The lesson here for social
entrepreneurs is to make maximum use of connections, no matter
how distant.
Our invitation to the Oval Office was motivated by the fact—of
which I had no prior knowledge—that the president wanted to send a
positive signal to Iran. As always, it was much easier to ride a horse
in the direction it was going. The wrestlers, USA Wrestling officials,
Bill Kirby, and I were graciously welcomed by the president. In
addition, we invited former hostage Bruce Laingen to join us (figure
4.6). His participation was an added bonus, and it caused the Los
Angeles Times to write that “Laingen’s presence showed the support
of former hostages for U.S. reconciliation with Iran.”
FIGURE 4.6 From left: William Kirby, Bruce Reider (team doctor), John Marks, John Giura
(wrestler), Mitch Hull (USA Wrestling, national teams director), Shawn Charles (wrestler),
President Bill Clinton, Larry Sciacchetano (USA Wrestling president), Zeke Jones (wrestler),
James Scherr (USA Wrestling executive director), Melvin Douglas (wrestler), Bruce Laingen
(former ambassador, hostage in Iran 1979–1981), and James McCord (referee).

The White House arranged for the U.S. government’s Worldnet

satellite TV network to film our visit to the Oval Office and broadcast
the proceedings to Iran. The idea was to send a signal about the
possibility of better relations. To make sure the Iranians got the
message, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry stated this at
a press briefing:

It would be accurate to say that [President Clinton is] drawing attention to an

exchange, a people-to-people exchange, that is maybe off the beaten path of
diplomacy, but it has something to say about the prospect and hope for more
beneficial relations between peoples.

As Track 2 practitioners, we prided ourselves on being “off the

beaten path,” and we were hugely pleased that the president saw fit
to use our work to tee up his approach to the Iran issue. From our
perspective, this was as good as it gets. Wrestling diplomacy had
provided a vivid new context in which to think about the possibility of
better relations between Iran and the United States. It had created
an extended metaphor that went like this: Wrestlers from the two
countries competed fiercely, but within mutually accepted rules. Both
sides recognized that differences existed, but they allowed their
common humanity to triumph.
After this event, we Searchers faced an operational dilemma. Our
meetings in Sweden had been conducted in great secrecy, whereas
our involvement in wrestling had been showcased by global media
and then by the White House. As pleased as we were by the positive
attention, we had lost the ability to carry out our work with Iran in
secret. We decided to make a virtue out of necessity and adopted a
two-track strategy: (1) we would sponsor public exchanges that
involved Iranians and Americans, and (2) we would continue to hold
confidential meetings.
On the exchange front, we were convinced that a rapid growth in
nonofficial, people-to-people visits in both directions could make a
major contribution to lessening the combustibility of U.S.-Iranian
relations. Although we knew that only governments could make
peace, history had shown—from the Cold War to the Oslo process to
South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy—that Track 2
activities could make a real difference. At the same time, activities
(such as wrestling) that were successful in one country would not
necessarily work in other places, and we recognized that a high level
of cultural sensitivity was required in the design of activities.
In addition, we knew we needed to be attentive to some wise
words from Rudolf Weiersmüller, the Swiss ambassador in Tehran. In
addition to being a former wrestler himself, he had a great deal of
experience interacting with Americans and Iranians because he
frequently served as the middleman in indirect talks between the
governments. He told us that he saw a basic difference in
negotiating styles between the two sides. In his view, Americans
were like a U.S. football team: they were ready to forget past results,
march down the field, and make immediate scores. In contrast,
Iranians were like chess players (ancient Persians having invented
the game). They developed complex strategies, took nothing on face
value, and planned ahead a dozen moves. Ambassador
Weiersmüller noted that these very different approaches represented
a major barrier to better relations.
During the next few years, we carried out a series of public
exchanges to help bridge the gap. We wanted to build a web of high-
profile relationships (figure 4.7). To this end, we organized two
Iranian-American cinema summits on the sidelines of the Cannes
Film Festival; we sponsored showings of Iranian movies at the
Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C.; we arranged for An Inconvenient Truth, the Academy Award–
winning documentary on global warming, to be shown in Iran; we
took American astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Bruce McCandless
to Iran and arranged reciprocal visits of scientists, environmentalists,
academics, and doctors (figure 4.8); we even cosponsored an
Iranian art exhibit in the United States (figure 4.9). One exchange of
which I was especially proud occurred when we brought a delegation
of six female Iranian filmmakers to the United States. The idea was
to spotlight the work of these highly skilled cinéastes and to have
their professionalism fly in the face of existing stereotypes about
Iranian women. They screened their films at Lincoln Center and the
Council on Foreign Relations in New York and at the Art Institute of
Chicago.
FIGURE 4.7 Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Professor Rouhollah Ramazani, and Foreign
Minister Javad Zarif.
FIGURE 4.8 Astronaut Bruce McCandless (center) shows visiting Iranian scientists the
American West.
FIGURE 4.9 Painting from Iranian art exhibit that toured the United States.

We even tried eclipse diplomacy in 1999 when Alan Hale

(codiscoverer of the Hale-Bopp comet) asked if we could arrange to
bring a scientific delegation to Iran to observe the last solar eclipse
of the millennium. He said that Isfahan in Iran would be the best
place on the planet to watch. Although we had never contemplated
an astronomical foray, we operated from the premise that success in
building bridges required innovation. We found an able Iranian host,
the Zirakzadeh Scientific Society, and we put together a group that
included twelve Americans. We even got NASA to provide a stunning
photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to be presented to
Iranian leaders. In addition to viewing the eclipse, the American
delegation made presentations at scientific institutions where, in Dr.
Bopp’s words, they were greeted “like rock stars”—as the American
wrestlers had been.
In all, we sponsored more than forty exchanges and other events
between Iranians and their American counterparts. For better or
worse, we became the most active U.S. organization working to build
better relations between Iran and the United States. We found it
difficult to make much of an impression in the United States, but the
Iranians paid careful attention. As Nasser Hadian of Tehran
University said, “What [Search for Common Ground] has been doing
has had a profound effect on the psyche of both the [Iranian] public
and the elite. . . . No other activities have had such an effect.”
Indeed, in 2000, the hardline Tehran newspaper Lesarat—which did
not intend to pay us a compliment—wrote, “Informed sources say
that a very important organization is active in America, called
“Research on Common Grounds” [sic] . . . Most of the activities in
connection with Iran are first planned in that organization.”
Both the Clinton and Khatami administrations showed
considerable interest in improving relations, but these efforts failed
for a variety of reasons involving national egos, opposition from
hard-liners in both countries, and the failure of the two governments
to pay sufficient attention to the needs of the other. In the end,
neither government was willing to expend the political capital
necessary to take advantage of the openings. There was a brief
respite in 2001 after 9/11. With George W. Bush in the White House,
the Iranians offered to cooperate in a shared effort to prevent
terrorism, and they worked in tandem with the United States in
installing a post-Taliban government in Afghanistan. However, in
January 2002 Bush famously asserted that Iran was part of the “axis
of evil,” and Iranian leaders became equally harsh in describing the
United States. After that the relationship turned completely sour.
As relations worsened, Bill Miller, our senior advisor for Iran,
became a principal conduit between the two countries. Before Iran’s
1979 revolution, Miller had spent five years there as a U.S. diplomat,
and he had developed a profound love for the country and its culture.
After Khomeini seized power in 1979, President Jimmy Carter asked
Miller to be the U.S. ambassador to Iran, but before he could be
confirmed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized by militant
students. Needless to say, Miller was never able to take up the post,
although he was very much involved in negotiations to free the
American hostages. After 444 days of captivity, the hostages were
released, but diplomatic relations were never resumed. In 1993,
President Clinton appointed Miller U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. He
stepped down in 1997 and joined Search to work on Iran. He proved
to be a superb Track 2 diplomat.
After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran’s president in 2005,
we found it virtually impossible to obtain visas for U.S. participants in
our exchanges. On several occasions, we had to cancel trips at the
last minute because the Iranian Foreign Ministry had not issued the
necessary entry permits. (I used to joke that the concept of a
nonrefundable airline ticket could not be translated into the Farsi
language.) We had little choice but to de-emphasize exchanges, and
we concentrated on arranging high-level meetings between Iranians
and Americans that were focused on the nuclear issue.
Our assumption was that someday negotiations on nuclear
matters would be necessary between Iran and the United States,
and a host of issues would have to be resolved for those talks to be
successful. With relations at a low point, we also realized that neither
government was likely to seriously consider the particulars of a
future agreement. Thus in 2005 we launched the U.S.-Iran Nuclear
Initiatives Group. Participants included top Iranian and American
experts on nuclear questions and people with policymaking
experience, including a UN nuclear inspector, a former chief
negotiator on nuclear issues for Iran, a hydrogen bomb designer,
and several others with similar credentials. The group focused on
providing impartial analysis and limited its work to technical issues.
The goals were to make available to policymakers in both countries
specific ways to strengthen the nonproliferation regime and to
contribute creative ideas to an eventual negotiation process.
From 2005 to 2007, the Nuclear Initiatives Group met on six
occasions with Javad Zarif, then Iran’s ambassador to the UN. Zarif
later became foreign minister, and he personally negotiated the
eventual nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
or JCPOA). In addition, Miller met privately with Zarif about once a
month. Here is what Zarif had to say about our role during this
period:

I believe you saved our negotiations. . . . Without the work of the group, I believe
discussions would have ended. . . . If there is any outcome of the negotiations that
is to the satisfaction of both sides, it will be a derivative of the discussions of this
group.

When Barack Obama became president of the United States in

2009, new possibilities emerged. Miller arranged for and attended
confidential meetings in Europe and New York between former U.S.
Secretary of Defense William Perry and Ali Akbar Salehi, then head
of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. Both men had access to top-
level policymakers. We never learned what Salehi told Iranian
leaders, but we knew that Perry reported directly to President
Obama his conclusion that agreements on nuclear issues were
possible. Miller believed that this was a key first step toward moving
the United States into the negotiations with Iran that resulted in the
eventual signing of a nuclear agreement.
FIGURE 4.10 From left: Marvin Miller, nuclear scientist; Olli Heinonen, former deputy
director, IAEA; Frank von Hippel, a Princeton University physicist; Ali Akhbar Salehi, former
head of Iranian Atomic Energy Organization; Rush Holt, former U.S. Congressman and a
physicist; and Ambassador Bill Miller at a meeting after signing of the JCPOA. All were
participants in Search’s Nuclear Initiatives Group.

While the official talks were underway, members of Search’s

Nuclear Initiatives Group (figure 4.10) collaborated on detailed
technical papers on how to overcome possible obstacles to
concluding agreements. Particularly important was a plan authored
by three participants—Frank von Hippel, Hossein Mousavian, and
Alex Glaser—to redesign the Arak heavy water reactor into a device
with far less yield of plutonium and to convert 20 percent enriched
uranium into fuel plates. This paper, which was given to both Iranian
and American negotiators, provided the basis on which the issue
was eventually resolved. As Foreign Minister Zarif said in 2016:

I have used what I learned from you when we last met in the negotiations,
particularly on conversion of the fuel to oxide form, the limit of the number of
centrifuges, and conversion of the Arak reactor. . . . Thank you for shaping my
thinking from the very beginning in how this could be resolved. . . . You can claim
parenthood in this endeavor. Thank you for putting the road in place for us to
follow.

Zarif’s American negotiating partner, Secretary of State John

Kerry, similarly stated in a 2017 filmed interview: “During the Iran
talks, the fresh ideas you provided helped us to achieve a
breakthrough on the Arak heavy water reactor.”
As a result of more than two decades of showing up with Iran, we
had developed numerous contacts—from the foreign minister down
—on nuclear matters and other political questions. As a result, when
opportunities presented themselves, we often were able to move
things forward. For instance, when three American hikers wandered
across the Iraq-Iran border in 2011 and were arrested, we were
approached by two of their mothers who had heard that we had good
connections with Iranian officials. Although one hiker, a young
woman, had already been freed, the two mothers hoped that our
unofficial, Track 2 intervention might assist in getting their sons
released from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. We agreed, and Bill
Miller used his regular meetings with Iranian officials in New York
and Europe to seek the release of the two young men who were
being held.
Miller understood that he was not going to be able to convince
the Iranians that the hikers should be released before their top
leadership decided it was time to do so. However, he believed he
might be able to hasten a decision by making things easier for them.
As Track 2 practitioners, we try to be win-win problem-solvers. We
are not bound by governmental procedures and protocols and often
have more leeway to explore possibilities that traditional diplomats
would be less likely to pursue.
It is obvious to us that parties in negotiation almost never reach
agreement for the same reasons, and that they virtually always act in
ways that they believe serve their best interests—which are
invariably different from those of the people with whom they are
negotiating. Moreover, solutions need to be found that allow
participants to save face. In the case of the hikers, when the moment
came for the Iranians to free them, we realized it would be important
to Iranian leaders that they should not be seen as having caved to
U.S. government pressure. Therefore, we suggested that the
Iranians might release the hikers to the care of American clergymen
—specifically Bishop John Chane, the former Episcopal Bishop of
Washington, D.C., and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former
Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C. (who was subsequently
defrocked because of his alleged involvement in sexual abuse
cases). Most of the top Iranian leaders were clerics themselves, and
we thought that dealing with American religious leaders would make
it easier for them to release the hikers.
Miller kept gently pressing the Iranians and providing them with
ideas. One day in September 2011 his phone rang, and he was told
that Iranian officials had decided to free the hikers and we should
immediately send the cardinal and the bishop, as well as a
prominent American Moslem leader, to Iran to receive the prisoners.
We were thrilled, but first a series of logistical problems had to be
overcome.
Normally it took months to arrange Iranian visas even for
prominent Americans like the bishop and the cardinal, and more
often than not the Iranians turned down the applications. In this case,
we were told we could pick up visas for the two clergymen within a
few days. Then there was the question of who was going to pay for
the hikers’ plane tickets from Tehran back to the United States. We
were relatively sure the Iranians would not be willing to do so, and
we knew the hikers would not be able to pay for their own tickets.
We had visions of them being stranded at Tehran’s airport and
realized that Search would probably have to be the banker for this
mission. We reasoned that the bishop and the cardinal needed to
carry enough cash to Tehran to buy, if necessary, one-way business
class tickets for the hikers, which would cost about $5,000 each.
Why business class? Search was—and is—a frugal, nonprofit
organization whose staff is obligated to fly economy class. But the
hikers had spent two years in a harsh Iranian prison, and it seemed
wrong to skimp on bringing them home. As president of Search, I
authorized an exception to our normal travel policy to allow the
released prisoners to fly business class.
In addition, we knew that the tickets would need to be paid for in
cash. Why cash? U.S. credit cards could not—and still cannot—be
used in Iran because of American financial sanctions. The cardinal
and the bishop would have to use cash to pay for the tickets and
their hotel rooms. Also, we were mindful that there is a U.S.
government requirement that anyone leaving the country with more
than $10,000 must make a customs declaration. We did not think it
would be a good idea for the bishop and the cardinal to have to
justify their trip to customs officials, so in the best Solomonic
tradition, we split the money in two so neither man would have to
carry more than $10,000.1

________________
1. We later learned that because both clergymen were traveling together and the money
was from one source our bright idea of dividing the money between them did not overcome
the requirement to declare the funds. Thus our strategy of splitting the money in two was
too clever by half, but no federal agents ever bothered us about it.

The bishop was a member of Washington’s stately Cosmos Club,

and he arranged a private room where Miller and I could meet him
and the cardinal to make final arrangements. We gave them their
plane tickets and two envelopes, each containing $6,000 in hundred-
dollar bills—$5,000 for each hiker’s plane ticket and $1,000 to pay
for hotels and meals. The cardinal and the bishop were both amused
and understanding about the need for cash, and they signed receipts
for the money. The bishop remarked that Search must have a very
understanding finance department because he was sure that he
never could have convinced his own diocesan comptroller to
approve a cash transaction of this kind.
The two clerics left for Tehran four days later (figure 4.11). They
were accompanied by Nihad Awad, the head of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). While they were changing
planes in Istanbul, President Obama telephoned to wish them well in
Tehran. The cardinal and the bishop had met with President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the year before in New York, and they had
prayed together for peace. At that time, the cardinal and the bishop
had asked Ahmadinejad for compassionate intervention regarding
the hikers. This time when they met Ahmadinejad told them,
according to Bishop Chane, “It was because of our presence that
they were able to move the process forward in releasing the hikers.”
FIGURE 4.11 Foreign Minister Javad Zarif greets Cardinal McCarrick and Bishop Chane
in Tehran.

In addition to our Track 2 efforts, Track 1 government officials

from two other countries were involved in freeing the hikers. The late
Sultan Qaboos of Oman played a critical role in convincing the
Iranians to consider the strategic utility, as well as the religious
imperative, of releasing the hikers, who had committed no crime.
And the Swiss government also played an important part.
In the end, we did not have to pay for the hikers’ airline tickets
because the Omani government provided a plane to fly the hikers
out of Iran. To the benefit of our organizational treasury, the Iranian
government also paid for hotel rooms in Tehran for the cardinal and
the bishop. Search got back the entire $12,000 we had advanced,
and our only cost was for the plane tickets for the bishop and the
cardinal (figure 4.12), who also flew business class.
FIGURE 4.12 Ambassador Bill Miller (center) welcomes Bishop Chane (left) and Cardinal
McCarrick (right) at Dulles Airport when they returned from Tehran on September 20, 2011.

We had kept White House and State Department officials

informed of what we were doing, and they had privately urged us to
continue our unofficial efforts. Through our persistence, we had
become prime interlocutors between Iran and the United States
because the two governments were not talking to each other in any
meaningful way at that time. When governments are communicating
well, there is much less space for Track 2 organizations like ours.
The opening for our involvement usually depends on there being a
high degree of animosity between the parties. We would prefer not to
be bottom feeders for whom opportunities increase as conflict
intensifies, but unfortunately we tend to be called upon when official
relations are at their worst. The world would be a much better place
if there were less demand for our services.
Nevertheless, by showing up on Iran, particularly before
governments were willing to act, we were able to plant the seeds for
what we hoped would be much bigger things to come. Our
involvement provided a testing ground for innovative ideas and joint
problem-solving. We helped build trust, which was necessary if
relations were ever going to improve. We created a certain number
of openings that Track 1 officials in both countries might have taken
greater advantage of if they had possessed the political will, which
they did not—and still do not.

OceanofPDF.com
 5
Enroll Credible Supporters

I
n addition to showing up, social entrepreneurs need to project
credibility. One important way to do this is to activate Principle #5,
“enroll credible supporters.” Successful social entrepreneurs
should be able to convince the outside world that they will achieve
what they say they will. Credibility is best gained by doing good work
and having a reputation for so doing, but social entrepreneurs can
increase the odds in their favor by borrowing credibility from
prestigious people. This is especially true when budding
entrepreneurs are not yet well-known and are developing new
ventures.
There are dangers, however, with this borrowing tactic. Social
entrepreneurs need to be cautious about bringing in powerful people
who are not aligned with their vision or who are inclined to
commandeer the work of others. In their quest to enroll credible
supporters, entrepreneurs should be careful not to lose control of
their organization or to act in ways that lack integrity. Particularly
perilous are strong-minded outsiders who prefer to do things their
own way and who have time on their hands. As the head of another
NGO once warned me about selecting new board members, “Be
sure to stay away from people who don’t have enough to do.”
The key is to enroll distinguished individuals who are willing to be
supportive—or at least who are not controlling or oppositional. That
being said, here are some specific ways for social entrepreneurs to
enhance their credibility.
 • Put well-known people on your board of directors and on
your advisory board. The first chair of Search’s board was Patricia
Aburdene. Her husband at the time, the late John Naisbitt, also
served on the board. Together this dynamic couple wrote the
Megatrends books (although Patricia only received credit as
coauthor of Megatrends 2000). These books were huge bestsellers
that described what John and Patricia saw to be the trends that were
reshaping the planet. Search’s credibility was definitely enhanced
when the Naisburdenes (as the two of them were collectively called)
proclaimed publicly that searching for common ground represented a
megatrend. In addition, they introduced us to people who were of
considerable help to the organization, and they provided us with a
series of good ideas that greatly contributed to our work. Above all,
by having them as board members, we were able to project an
image of being on the cutting edge of global thinking.
• Seek publicity for your accomplishments, but don’t overdo
it. Favorable attention can put an entrepreneurial venture on the
map, but too much or unwarranted or premature self-promotion can
be detrimental. Social entrepreneurs should avoid being criticized for
being publicity hounds. I adopted a policy of not talking publicly
about future projects until I was reasonably certain that they were
actually going to happen. For example, I waited until I knew for sure
that the American wrestling team would be traveling to Iran before I
alerted the media, and then I did it discreetly—not by issuing a press
release but by going to an acquaintance at the Washington Post and
offering an exclusive to the paper if it sent a journalist to Tehran to
cover the tournament. The Post’s editors agreed, and they assigned
the story to their reporter Kenneth Cooper. However, my caution
caused a problem. Because I had waited until almost the last minute
before making arrangements, through no fault of his own Cooper
was late in applying for a visa from Iran’s slow bureaucracy.
Fortunately, on the last possible day he could have traveled without
missing the wrestling tournament, he received his visa—thanks to
one of the Iranian participants in our U.S.-Iran Working Group who
expedited the issuing process. Cooper reached Iran just in time, and
he wound up writing two articles for the Post that included mention of
our role in launching wrestling diplomacy. Nevertheless, I was not
able to provide the Post with the exclusive coverage I had promised
it would receive. Although I kept my word and didn’t alert any other
media outlets, the global press learned the Americans were coming
to Tehran from the Iranian side and from USA Wrestling. As a result,
international reporters showed up in large numbers. Fortunately, no
one at the Post complained, and the huge amount of media attention
we received turned out to be very helpful for Search.
• Don’t bad-mouth others. In the course of their careers, social
entrepreneurs make contact with hundreds, if not thousands, of
people and organizations. Their credibility is enhanced—or at least
not damaged—if they can minimize outside criticism. A good way to
avoid being a target—in addition to not doing anything to deserve it
—is not to speak ill of others. This insight turned out to be
particularly important to us at Search when we became relatively
successful at fund-raising, which might have caused other
organizations to resent us. In our field, we were the big boys and
girls on the block, and we were susceptible to being disparaged by
those whose organizations had not raised as much money as we
had. For the most part, we avoided this by not sharing negative
views of others and by being as helpful as possible whenever
outsiders contacted us. Not only was this a good strategy, but it was
also consistent with our core values.
• Secure the services of distinguished people. Even when
well-known outsiders who are not control freaks share the vision of a
social entrepreneur, bringing them into the organization often does
not work. A lesson I learned the hard way was that former
ambassadors do not necessarily make effective NGO employees. In
general terms, no matter how renowned the individual, success in
one career is not necessarily a predictor of what would happen in
another. With this caution in mind, however, including the right
people, when it works, can have a huge payoff. This is what
happened after our Middle East initiative was approached by former
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and Ambassador to Egypt Alfred
“Roy” Atherton (figure 5.1). Atherton was retired, had heard about
our work, and made an unsolicited call to me, saying that he wanted
to become involved. We had never before had such a high-level
volunteer, and he became the chair of our Middle East Advisory
Board. Similarly, we made another productive move in enrolling
Peter Constable, a wise, silver-haired, former U.S. Ambassador to
Zaire, as our Middle East project’s first executive director. These two
experienced diplomats came from a world of protocol and
démarches. To join our free-flowing organization clearly required
major leaps of faith on their part. They provided instant credibility for
us, and they were among the few retired ambassadors who had the
right skill sets for our work. In addition, they gave us standing on the
Track 1 level at a time when many people still saw us as a fringe
organization. Their presence—with its implied endorsement—helped
make it possible for us to receive significant increases in funding.

FIGURE 5.1 Search Middle East advisory board chair, Ambassador Roy Atherton, meets
with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

In Macedonia (now the Republic of North Macedonia) we opened

our first ever field office in 1993, and the strategy of hiring an
eminent outsider also worked well there. I had a direct experience of
this when I visited Skopje, the capital city, for the first time, and I was
taken directly from the airport to a private lunch with the country’s
president, the late Kiro Gligorov. I had never before been wined and
dined by a head of state—nor would I ever be again. The reason it
happened had little to do with me. It was because we had engaged
the services of former U.S. Ambassador Robert Frowick to be our
country director (figure 5.2). Frowick had been about to retire the
year before when the Acting Secretary of State, Lawrence
Eagleburger, asked him to accept an unorthodox mission involving
Macedonia, which had just become a separate country with the
breakup of Yugoslavia. At that point, Macedonia’s independence was
so new that no Western country had yet officially recognized it or
sent an ambassador.
FIGURE 5.2 John Marks, Search Country Director Ambassador Robert Frowick, and
Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov just before they sat down for lunch.
 Frowick’s assignment was to go to Skopje as the U.S.
government’s unofficial representative. Officially he represented the
Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and he
was given the cumbersome title Director of the Spill-Over Monitor
Mission. In this capacity, he lacked most of the amenities and
support a U.S. ambassador normally receives, but he was the
highest ranking foreign official in the country, and he became, in
effect, the Western proconsul. As such, he worked closely and
effectively with President Gligorov to prevent ethnic violence. I used
to compare him to the Marquis de Lafayette—that is to say, the
foreigner who had the greatest impact in securing a country’s
independence.
After six months in his CSCE role, Frowick left Macedonia and
went home to what he thought would be a peaceful retirement in
northern California’s wine country, but he remained hooked by
Macedonia. Although I had never met him, he seemed to be exactly
what we needed to launch our program, so I cold-called him. He was
very impressive on the phone, and I wound up offering him the job
as our country director in Skopje. He accepted. That made him
Search’s first full-time employee outside of Washington, D.C.
Frowick’s goal was, as he put it, “to keep Macedonia from
exploding.” Search gave him a platform from which he could
strengthen the country’s immune system. He brought to the job an
ambassadorial presence and impeccability. His trademark outfit was
a white linen suit, which might have been designed by Halston, the
famous fashion designer who happened to be his brother. And, of
course, he still maintained the connections he had formed earlier,
including his close relationship with President Gligorov. With
Frowick’s influence, Gligorov turned into an extremely credible
supporter of Search, and our relationship with the president laid the
groundwork for what became one of our most successful country
programs. Having the president of the country in our corner certainly
enhanced our credibility.
Macedonia provided a model for effective conflict prevention.
Under the leadership of Frowick and our subsequent country
directors, Search became a key player in what was a three-legged
effort. The components were a small military peacekeeping force
whose members wore the blue helmets of the UN, governmental
foreign aid programs, and NGO actions such as ours. These three
elements represented an exemplary mix of diplomatic, economic,
military, psychological, and conflict resolution measures. However,
probably the most important reason the country did not explode was
that Macedonians were fully aware of the appalling violence in
nearby Bosnia, and most of them—no matter what their ethnicity—
did not want their country to suffer the same fate. In Macedonia, the
bottom line was that the leadership, from the president on down,
never allowed ethnic enmities to overwhelm them, and they mostly
avoided demagoguery. Before things could get out of hand, they
demonstrated sufficient political will to make compromises and
resolve problems.
Our role in this violence-prevention campaign was to carry out
projects to promote tolerance and build bridges between and among
the country’s various ethnic groups. One of our first efforts was to
convene an interethnic training workshop for Macedonian journalists
on how to report on conflict in accurate, noninflammatory ways. As
so many NGOs have done before and since, that project involved
taking a group of trainees to a resort hotel outside the capital city
and bringing in foreign experts to instruct them. At the end of the
workshop we asked participants to evaluate their experience; they
said that they welcomed the chance to get away from their daily
routines and relax in what was for them a luxurious setting, but they
had heard much of what the trainers had to offer before. They
advised that the training would have been considerably more
effective if it had been more hands-on and tied to their actual work.
Instead of their being told how to cover interethnic cooperation, they
wanted a direct experience of actually reporting on it.
As a result of this feedback, we launched a new project to
support team reporting involving the country’s leading Slavic
Macedonian, Albanian, and Turkish language newspapers. Each
participating paper agreed to provide a journalist to coauthor articles
with a journalist from another paper that was published in a different
language and targeted a different ethnic group. The journalists
carried out the investigation together, and their articles
simultaneously appeared in their home newspapers under a joint
byline. (Later we added pairs of reporters from TV and radio
stations.)
At first we supplied editors from abroad who, we believed, would
also function as mediators between the reporters. Denise Hamilton
of the Los Angeles Times was the first such editor. Under her
direction, an Albanian and an ethnic-Macedonian reporter worked
together to research and coauthor a multipart series on the country’s
health care systems, a seemingly nonpolitical issue that affected
almost everyone. The common ground turned out to be that most of
the population suffered from a lack of reliable medical attention.
Regardless of ethnicity, getting sick in Macedonia was not a good
idea.
By working together as a team, the reporters were able to move
beyond incendiary and stereotypical coverage of the other. In the
process, their output minimized the tendency to incite conflict that
was so prevalent in the Balkan region. After a few joint articles were
written, the reporters found that they no longer needed an expatriate
editor. Altogether this project produced more than sixty articles and
three TV series that encouraged dialogue and mutual understanding.
In addition, we continued to hold training and discussion programs
for journalists.
Macedonia is a comparatively small country, and during those
years we worked closely with virtually every newspaper, TV station,
and radio outlet. As a direct result, during the Kosovo crisis in 1998–
99 when Macedonia was on the brink of serious ethnic violence, the
press was relatively restrained in its coverage and largely avoided
descending into hate media, which had been prevalent in other parts
of former Yugoslavia. In fact, two Macedonian radio stations that had
been involved with us—one Albanian and the other ethnic-
Macedonian—even shared information and worked together to
debunk rumors. Although Macedonia experienced some violence, it
never got out of hand, and the country stayed relatively peaceful. We
were proud of the contribution we made in helping to keep the lid on
violence. Our effort to promote tolerance certainly saved lives.
In 1994, Robert Frowick stepped down as our country director.
He was replaced by Eran Fraenkel, an expert on the Balkans who
was fluent in both Slavic Macedonian and Albanian—and who told us
he could “get by” in Turkish. These were the country’s three principal
languages. Frowick certainly lent us his ambassadorial standing, but
Fraenkel brought a different kind of credibility because he was so
skilled on the linguistic and cultural fronts. He also brought his wife
Edith and their two-year-old daughter, Sarah, with him.
Unexpectedly, having his family with him greatly contributed to two of
our most innovative projects.
At that time, all of Macedonia’s schools were rigidly segregated
by language, and the emphasis was on rote learning. Schools did
not offer courses in which students could learn any local language
except their parent tongue, although most people from ethnic
minorities could speak Slavic Macedonian, the language of the
majority. Bilingual classes were, in fact, illegal. Consequently, from
early childhood on, a good number of people in the country had little
or no contact with their fellow citizens from other ethnic groups. This
kind of isolation perpetuated negative stereotypes that usually
stayed with children into adulthood.
When Sarah Fraenkel was ready to start school, her parents had
to decide whether they were going to send her to a Macedonian-
language or an Albanian-language kindergarten. They would have
much preferred a diverse, bilingual class, but they had to make a
zero-sum choice and wound up enrolling her in a Macedonian-
language school. When it was time to celebrate Sarah’s third
birthday, ethnic tensions in the country were particularly high, and
the Fraenkels believed they could not safely hold a party for the
children of both their Slavic Macedonian and Albanian friends. Faced
with what to them was an unpalatable choice, Edith had an insight.
She declared that Search needed to do something to change things,
and she suggested that the answer might be to start bilingual
kindergartens.
Edith’s vision took on concrete form shortly thereafter when Eran
Fraenkel and Violeta Beška of the University of Skopje attended a
conference in Norway. They heard two speakers—one Palestinian-
Israeli and one Jewish-Israeli—describe how an organization inside
Israel, Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, ran a school where Hebrew
and Arabic were coequal, and where the playing field was level for
both ethnic groups. This was exactly the kind of early education
system they had dreamt of creating in Macedonia. They approached
the two speakers and secured their help in designing a curriculum
and training materials for future kindergartens. A partnership was
born between champions of ethnic coexistence in Macedonia and
Israel.
Eran Fraenkel drafted a proposal to establish bilingual
kindergartens, but he found that no funding was available from
Macedonian sources. Neither were international donors initially
supportive. But even if he had found the money quickly, nothing
could have moved forward without convincing the Macedonian
government to change the law that prohibited bilingual education. It
took Fraenkel three years to get the interethnic kindergartens off the
ground. He persuaded the Swiss government’s foreign aid agency to
provide funds, and he lobbied the Macedonian government to
change the law forbidding bilingual education. (However, that change
only applied to students of kindergarten age.) By the time he was
able to move forward, his daughter was already too old to attend one
of the new classes. But Fraenkel was not deterred, and he and his
successors wound up creating a nationwide network of thirteen
kindergartens that they called Mozaik. These classrooms played a
key role in transforming early childhood education in Macedonia. For
the first time ever, young children were able to interact and receive
instruction in an inclusive, bilingual environment in which no ethnic
group predominated and everyone was treated equally. Mozaik
stressed joy and critical thinking, along with tolerance and conflict
resolution. Here are some brief stories from Mozaik:

• Aleksandra, a Macedonian kindergartener, loves Ensar, an

Albanian classmate. Aleksandra uses blocks to build both a
mosque and a church. She says that she has placed the church
next to the mosque so when she and Ensar marry, they will each
be able to worship in nearby buildings.
• Veton and Christian spend hours playing and talking together, but
they don’t understand the other’s language. Still they find ways to
communicate, and they are the best of friends.
 • Jana explains to classmates what the word “nostalgia” means:
That is when you are at home, but you miss Mozaik and want to
be there.
• According to a parent, her son Nikola always reminds the family
of how they should behave at home—just like the children do at
Mozaik.

After eight years with Search in Macedonia, the Fraenkels

decided Sarah needed a broader education than she could receive
in Skopje, so Search reassigned Eran Fraenkel to Brussels where
Sarah could attend schools with more diverse opportunities. One of
Fraenkel’s successors as our Macedonian country director was
Vilma Venkovska Milčev. She had been the first staff member hired
by Frowick, and Mozaik was her passion. She was deeply convinced
—both professionally and as a mother whose son was in the first
Mozaik class—that Macedonia very much needed bilingual
education. She also recognized that the Mozaik kindergartens would
not survive in the long run unless they became part of the
Macedonian public education system. The Swiss government had
been extraordinarily generous and far-sighted in financing Mozaik for
thirteen years, which was an unprecedented length of time for any
international funder to stay with a project. But Milčev knew that even
the Swiss would not continue forever, and she worked relentlessly to
have the Macedonian government adopt the Mozaik kindergartens—
and pay for them. The parents of students were hugely supportive,
and the Mozaik classes had long waiting lists; however, Macedonia’s
educational establishment was resistant to change. Finally, in 2010
Milčev succeeded, and the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy
agreed to assume ownership of Mozaik, with local governments
taking on the costs, including the salaries of the teachers. Thus
Mozaik ended its dependence on foreign funding and became both
Macedonian and sustainable. This was the first Search project that
was institutionalized by the host country.
Subsequently, the ministry expanded the program and opened
many new classrooms while retaining most of the original model. In
addition, Milčev took Mozaik to neighboring Kosovo, where it was
replicated for ethnic Albanian and Serbian children in partnership
with Save the Children.
In her struggle to make Mozaik a permanent part of the
Macedonian education system, Milčev modeled—as Fraenkel had
done before her—the kind of persistent behavior that is necessary
for successful social entrepreneurship. They kept moving forward
and eventually found ways to get around the substantial obstacles
they had faced.
Fraenkel exhibited this same type of behavior on another front.
From his first days in Macedonia, in addition to being concerned
about the lack of bilingual education, he was unhappy with the poor
quality of TV programming that his daughter Sarah was watching.
Although she understood the Macedonian language, the tube offered
her mostly not so funny clown shows, as well as subtitled cartoons
from the United States and Germany. Along with Sheldon Himelfarb,
then executive producer of Common Ground Productions, Fraenkel
came to me with a proposal to produce a dramatic children’s TV
series in Macedonia that promoted ethnic understanding. They had
already convinced Children’s Television Workshop, the producer of
Sesame Street, to be their partner.
Although I am too old to have been part of the Sesame
generation, I recognized that a partnership with Sesame would add a
huge amount of credibility to Search’s then fledging efforts to use TV
productions to defuse conflict. I was impressed that Ed Palmer, one
of the original developers of Sesame, had traveled to Skopje three
times to help design the curriculum at the heart of the series. Even
so, I was not at all enthusiastic about making a children’s series. I
thought we should concentrate on adults who, from my perspective,
were the ones threatening ethnic violence. That turned out to be a
short-sighted view on my part. To his credit, Fraenkel did not give up.
He had a vision that TV drama could shift the attitudes and
behaviors of future generations of Macedonians—and it did. But that
would be years away.
When Fraenkel first proposed the series to me, I told him that
dramatic television programming for children was a lovely idea, but I
was not convinced that we could find the money to produce it.
However, I did not categorically veto the idea, and I held out a
glimmer of hope by reminding him that Search had a policy that if
staff members recommended a new project that was consistent with
our vision—which this project clearly was—and if funding could be
found to implement it, I would approve it. Thus, I gave him a green
light but I felt it was really a yellow light because I didn’t think the
money would be there. It turned out that I was wrong, and my lack of
enthusiasm was misguided.
It took Fraenkel many months to find the $1.5 million needed to
produce the first eight episodes of the series that was to be named
Nashe Maalo (Our Neighborhood). Among many potential funders,
Fraenkel had approached the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID). Unfortunately, its director for Macedonia had
not seemed interested. But Fraenkel found a work-around. At a
reception, he approached Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to
Macedonia and described the children’s TV series he had in mind. In
making his pitch, Fraenkel was able to drop the name of our
prospective partner, Sesame Street, which represented the gold
standard in children’s television. The ambassador responded to the
proposal with enthusiasm. He said that such a series was likely to
have a greater impact on Macedonia than most of the foreign aid
projects that were then being carried out. He assured Fraenkel that
he would push USAID to provide a substantial part of the $1.5 million
needed.
Even though a U.S. ambassador such as Chris Hill was the
nominal boss of the USAID director, what Fraenkel did in going
around the USAID chain of command was risky. Often when a U.S.
ambassador told USAID to fund a project—and I learned this the
hard way from personal experience—the USAID staff would become
resentful that the ambassador was interfering on their turf, and they
would either find myriad reasons not to do what he or she wanted or
would slow-walk the project and wait for the ambassador to go
home. However, Fraenkel figured he had nothing to lose, and in this
case he picked the right person to intervene because Hill was a very
forceful ambassador. Due to Hill’s urging, USAID agreed to provide
about $500,000 to get the project rolling. With this pledge of support
in hand, Fraenkel was able to find sufficient funding for the TV series
not only to pay for the first season but for four additional seasons. In
the end, donors included the British, Dutch, Swedish, and Swiss
governments, as well as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur,
Skoll, and C. S. Mott foundations.
The last obstacle came unexpectedly in 1998 when war broke out
in neighboring Kosovo, and thousands of Kosovar Albanians fled into
Macedonia—much to the unhappiness of most Macedonians.
Previously, Macedonian state television (called MTV) had agreed to
provide production facilities and to broadcast Nashe Maalo.
However, with bombs falling across the border in Kosovo and a
refugee crisis emerging, MTV decided it did not want to air a series
that involved ethnic tolerance. Obviously, an unforeseen event like
the war in Kosovo could have been a disaster for us, but we did not
give up. We managed to construct our own soundstage in an empty
warehouse and cobbled together a network of independent TV
stations that reached the whole country. However, in those days
computer-based transmission was not yet possible, and we had to
rely on the mail and motorcycle couriers to deliver broadcast tapes to
local stations. Altogether forty-one episodes of Nashe Maalo were
aired, and it was a huge hit. Even MTV came around. Four years
after it had refused to broadcast the series, it agreed to show it in
both the Slavic Macedonian and Albanian languages.
Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress wrote this
about Nashe Maalo: “Don’t expect a Balkan Big Bird or cuddly
Muppets. Think subtitles and a rap theme in four languages.”
FIGURE 5.3 Karmen, the talking apartment house.

The series centered on an apartment house in which four families

lived—one Slavic Macedonian, one Albanian, one Turkish, and one
Roma (Gypsy). At the suggestion of Sesame, we made the
apartment house into an animated, talking character named Karmen
(figure 5.3). Only the kids could hear Karmen’s wise and witty words,
and she became an electronic version of the Delphic Oracle. She
appeared on the screen of an old TV set, and she used magic to fill
the kids’ heads with visions of what might be possible. In the
process, she helped the children understand the fears and beliefs
that led to ethnic prejudice, and she showed the kids how they could
put themselves into the shoes of others.
One program featured a story about a Turkish girl who, without
asking permission, borrowed her mom’s necklace. When the mother
realized that the necklace was missing, she immediately assumed
that it had been stolen by the Roma woman who worked for the
family as a cleaning lady. In the end, the daughter admitted that she
was the guilty party, and the mother realized that blaming the cleaner
without evidence was a result of her stereotyping of the Roma.
In producing Nashe Maalo, we learned a great deal from our
Sesame partners (figure 5.4). For many years, they had made
programs “based on the belief that television can help children
learn.” Nashe Maalo combined Sesame’s curriculum-based
approach with what was then our six years of experience in conflict
prevention in Macedonia. The intended outcome was to break down
ethnic stereotypes and promote understanding. The series was
based on extensive research and analysis, involving both before-
and-after studies and focus groups. It spun off a number-one music
video, a magazine, a teacher’s guide, and even a puppet theater.

FIGURE 5.4 Mozaik kids Nashe Maalo cast members.

Our colleagues from Sesame impressed upon us how important it

was to conduct thorough evaluations to confirm that the series was
achieving its goals. Independent evaluators found that before
watching the series only 30 percent of Macedonian children were
willing to invite a kid from another ethnic group to their home to play,
but the percentage doubled to 60 percent among kids who viewed
the first eight episodes of Nashe Maalo. We felt hugely validated by
this extraordinary attitude shift that the series created just in its first
year.
In 2004 when the series came to an end, we commissioned
evaluators to poll 1,200 Macedonian kids to provide a final look at
what we had accomplished. Here are the key findings:

• 91 percent of Macedonia’s kids watched the series, as did 75

percent of the country’s adults.
• 32 percent of the children discussed the series in school with
their teachers.
• Almost all viewers came to understand what was known in
Macedonia as the Nashe Maalo logic, which involved “a more
open attitude of inclusivity (embracing diversity), pioneered by the
show. . . . It provided a national reference point because of its
impact as a model.”

Although we were gratified by what we accomplished with Nashe

Maalo, we understood that a single TV series, however popular,
could not overcome the root causes of interethnic mistrust and
hostility. But it could help considerably, and we did something that
had never been accomplished before in Macedonia: We created a
model of ethnic tolerance—“a national reference point”—that most
citizens, regardless of ethnicity, came to recognize as the ideal, even
when they did not live up to it.
In 2001, when armed conflict broke out inside Macedonia, A1 TV
in Skopje asked our permission, which we readily granted, to rerun
Nashe Maalo episodes on a daily basis. In addition, cast members
filmed a public statement in their native languages with the theme,
“We want our neighborhood to be a peaceful neighborhood.” And the
child actors, who had appeared in the series and had become
national matinee idols, made six public service announcements
(PSAs) to tamp down the violence. Refet Abazi, one of the series
directors, described the impact of the series as follows:

You know how in the U.S. you have adults who identify as being of the Sesame
generation? Well, here in Macedonia, you have created the Nashe Maalo
generation.

Nashe Maalo was appreciated at Macedonia’s highest level.

Boris Trajkovski, who was Kiro Gligorov’s successor as president of
the country, had this to say about the series: “Knowing the positive
outcome of Search for Common Ground in Macedonia’s previous
activities, the government hopes that Nashe Maalo will become an
integral part of kids’ everyday life, not only in this but also in future
generations.”
President Trajkovski also said the Mozaik kindergartens are
“imperative for our country.” Like President Gligorov before him,
Trajkovski was clearly an enthusiastic supporter of our work.
Perhaps in some places having the backing of the president of the
country may not be a good idea. Nevertheless, having started with
Robert Frowick, the Lafayette of Macedonia, we had built a network
of credible supporters across the country who helped us immensely
in preventing the kind of ethnic warfare that was so disastrously
waged in other parts of the Balkans.

OceanofPDF.com
 6
Expect the Dunbar Factor

P
eter was blind, and a seeing-eye dog named Dunbar went
everywhere with him. In 1998, Peter applied for a job with
Search in Washington, D.C. We had never employed a person
who could not see and who needed a guide dog. Peter was clearly
qualified, but I felt compelled to ask him a whole set of questions that
I would not have asked a seeing person. Would he be able to use
our computer system? How many times a day would Dunbar have to
be walked? Would Dunbar foul the office if Peter was too busy to
take him out? Peter had no problem providing satisfactory answers. I
offered him the job, and he accepted.
There was one important question that I did not think to ask: Was
anyone in our office allergic to dogs? The question simply did not
occur to me because I was a dog lover. I soon was told that I did
have a colleague with a canine allergy. It was Angela, my assistant,
and I certainly did not want to lose her. What to do? We needed a
work-around. We moved Peter into a large office with plenty of space
for Dunbar to lie on the floor while Peter worked. This office was
located as far away as possible from Angela’s, which was next to
mine. Whenever Peter needed to attend a meeting with me, I went to
his office. Usually staff members came to me for meetings, but Peter
and Dunbar were granted ongoing exceptions. Thus Angela was
able to maintain her distance from Dunbar.
I learned a specific lesson and a very general one from this
experience. Specifically, before hiring someone with a service dog,
find out if any colleagues might have an allergy. More important was
the general lesson: Even when social entrepreneurs ask all the
questions they think are relevant, important issues may arise that
should have been considered but weren’t because the entrepreneurs
didn’t know what they didn’t know. In pursuing their goals, social
entrepreneurs are likely to face unanticipated, often destabilizing
events. Even the best laid plans and the most thorough research will
not prevent these from occurring. The only defense is to realize, in
the words of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that
there are going to be “unknown unknowns.” I call this the Dunbar
Factor. Principle #6 of social entrepreneurship is “expect the Dunbar
Factor.” There is no escape from this. In response, social
entrepreneurs need to be agile enough to minimize the damage and
to make the most out of unforeseen events. To put it another way, if
you have a lemon, make lemonade.
In my experience, the Dunbar Factor most often comes into play
when social entrepreneurs are launching new ventures. For
example, in chapter 5 I described how unexpected warfare broke out
in Kosovo just as our Macedonian program was about to begin
production of the Nashe Maalo television series. It had not occurred
to our staff that this might happen, that it would result in a massive
flow of Kosovar refugees fleeing into Macedonia, and that a by-
product would be that Macedonian TV would renege on its
agreement to broadcast our series. Since we had not foreseen this
possibility, we had no contingency plan for dealing with it.
Nevertheless, we were sufficiently nimble to patch together a work-
around, but things certainly would have been easier if we had asked
the right questions in advance and had come up earlier with a Plan
B.
For us at Search, the central African country of Burundi provided
numerous examples of the Dunbar Factor. Our involvement there
grew out of an unexpected challenge. In October 1994, my old friend
Lionel Rosenblatt invited me to a meeting where the growing
violence in Burundi was to be discussed. Rosenblatt and I had dated
roommates in college, and we had served together as civilian
advisors in Vietnam. After a successful diplomatic career in which he
had specialized in saving countless lives of people fleeing violent
conflict, Rosenblatt had retired from the Foreign Service and become
head of Refugees International, an NGO that protected displaced
people around the world. When he asked me to come to this
meeting, it was only a few months after genocide had taken place in
Rwanda, and he feared that Burundi, which bordered Rwanda and
had a similar mix of Hutus and Tutsis, was headed down a similar
path. Although the killing in Burundi had not yet reached the
horrendous level that had occurred in Rwanda, massacres had
become regular occurrences, and thousands of Burundians were
dying every month in interethnic carnage. One of Rosenblatt’s main
concerns was that clandestine radio stations in Burundi were
broadcasting hateful programming that mirrored the content of
Rwanda’s Radio des Milles Collines. This Hutu-run station had
incited mass murder with inflammatory programming that had
described Tutsis as cockroaches and exhorted listeners to stamp
them out.
Rosenblatt knew that Search was involved in media
programming, and he wanted us to use jamming to stop hate radio in
Burundi. I explained to him that we had no experience with jamming.
Instead I said that our specialty was to produce programs that
brought people together and lessened violence. Rosenblatt replied,
“You claim to be an organization that prevents conflict. If you can’t do
something to stop Burundi from becoming a killing field, what good
are you?”
Rosenblatt’s words stung deeply. I was strongly committed to
preventive action, and I felt the need to act, as Susan did when I told
her about the conversation. On the spot, she and I decided to travel
to Burundi to explore what an organization like ours could do. We
invited Rosenblatt to join us, and he accepted.
Despite our decision to fly off, we had a problem to overcome.
Search didn’t have the money to pay for the trip. At this point in our
history, we had virtually no funds on hand to develop new projects.
However, I knew a donor who liked to provide seed money for
innovative ventures. This was John Whitehead, a former deputy
secretary of state and a Goldman Sachs banker. I contacted him,
and his foundation sent a check for $10,000 in return mail.
 Within a week, Rosenblatt, Susan, and I were on a plane headed
to Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, to see what we could do to help
defuse the violence. Before leaving, we sought recommendations on
people to meet. The key referral came from Kofi Annan, who was
then the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping. He
recommended that we contact Ambassador Ahmedou Ould-
Abdallah, the Special Representative in Burundi of the UN
Secretary-General. This turned out to be particularly important
because, as we learned later, Ould-Abdallah was the unofficial
leader of the international community’s effort to prevent genocide.
He also proved to be a common grounder to his core. (Years later,
after he retired, he would become a Search board member.)
When we contacted Ould-Abdallah’s office to set up an
appointment, we were told that he was scheduled to be in Europe
during the week we were going to be in Burundi. Fortunately we
were able to arrange a meeting with him in a restaurant in Brussels,
where we had a long layover between planes. Over lunch, we made
our introductions. Then I launched into a description of how Search
might contribute to reducing the level of violence in Burundi. To
illustrate I started to draw a diagram on what I thought was a paper
napkin; however, the napkin turned out to be made of linen. Susan
quickly realized that my pen was ruining the fabric, and she told me
to stop. Somewhat embarrassed, I continued my pitch with words
only. Unbeknownst to me, Susan stuck the defaced napkin in her
purse. Months later she put it into a picture frame with a caption
below it that said this was my “conceptual framework” for Burundi
and presented it to me (figure 6.1).
FIGURE 6.1 Conceptual framework for Burundi.

In my view, the drawing, which remained on my office wall for the

next twenty years, turned out to be a graphic representation of all the
questions I didn’t know enough to ask when I first went to Burundi. In
other words, it was a picture of the not-knowing quality that is
inherent in the Dunbar Factor.
For whatever reason, Ould-Abdallah did not disqualify us—
neither because I had ruined the napkin nor because we at Search
had little prior knowledge about Burundi. Perhaps he was desperate;
perhaps no other NGO had approached him and claimed that it
could help prevent violence; perhaps he was impressed by our
experience elsewhere and our tentative plans for Burundi; or
perhaps he was persuaded by our passion and commitment. It was
probably a combination of all of the above. In any case, he
encouraged us to begin activities in Burundi as soon as possible.
At that point, we still did not have any funding to set up a
program, and Ould-Abdallah became our champion. He proceeded
to call the USAID country director and urged that we should be given
an emergency grant. As a direct result, USAID came through in what
seemed to be record time. Two months after we first met Ould-
Abdallah, we opened an office in Bujumbura.
With Ould-Abdallah’s agreement, we decided that our first activity
would be to create a radio studio that would produce programming to
counter hate radio. Radio was the only medium that reached the
whole country, and its impact—albeit negative—had been
demonstrated in Rwanda. In Burundi we wanted to produce
programming that had the opposite effect—i.e., that encouraged
peaceful coexistence, spurred dialogue, and reduced polarization.
We believed that the antidote to hate radio was neither jamming nor
love radio. In our view, what was needed was common ground radio.
To this end, we established Studio Ijambo (“wise words” in
Kirundi, the language spoken by both Hutus and Tutsis). By setting
up a radio studio as opposed to a station, we reasoned that we
would be less vulnerable to closure by the authorities if programming
angered them; that we could avoid the hassle of obtaining a
broadcast license and finding transmitters; and that we would not be
competing with the country’s other stations. Instead we would be
supporting those stations by furnishing them with high-quality
programming, which we would provide at no cost. By being
cooperative and generous, we would be following our organizational
practice of modeling the behavior we wanted to encourage in the
population as a whole.
Studio Ijambo hired both Hutu and Tutsi reporters, and it became
Burundi’s only media producer with people of both ethnicities
working together on an equal basis. We asked them to leave their
ethnicity at the door. To be employed by the studio, staff members
needed to be committed not to the predominance of their ethnic
group but to the promotion of independent, accurate journalism. This
was not easy. As Bryan Rich, the studio’s first director, explained, “In
Burundi, being ‘independent’ is equated with betrayal, and therefore
the notion of independence itself is alien and dangerous.”
Despite the death of one of our reporters in what was generally
believed to be an ethnically instigated murder, Studio Ijambo became
hugely popular and reached a mass audience in both the Tutsi and
Hutu communities. During our peak years, we produced fifteen hours
a week of original programming. When the government forbade any
contact with rebel groups, we spliced together parallel interviews that
allowed the parties to hear each other’s perspectives. We convened
roundtable discussions with people who had been unwilling to talk
directly to each other. The studio even had a fleet of motorcycles
enabling our journalists to travel to remote parts of the country and
phone in news reports.
The studio produced a considerable amount of investigative
reporting that relied on mixed Hutu-Tutsi teams of reporters who
provided protection for each other during dangerous assignments. At
one point in 1998, the studio broke a story about a massacre
committed by government soldiers who were mostly Tutsis. Several
high government officials wanted to penalize the studio for
uncovering this atrocity, but the country’s president, Pierre Buyoya,
himself a Tutsi, disagreed. He said that our reporters were only doing
their jobs. As a result, Burundi experienced a major turnaround. A
few days after our report aired, the government set up a commission
of inquiry and arrested three officers involved in the killings. Never
before had there been accountability for human rights abuses;
impunity had long been the norm. Afterward, the UN Security Council
took special note of this positive change.
In addition to investigative reports, the studio produced numerous
multi-episodic radio series that became national institutions. One that
was particularly popular was called Pillars of Humanity; it told real-
life stories of Hutus who had saved the lives of Tutsis and of Tutsis
who had saved Hutus. The idea was to portray these people as
heroes and, in the process, to redefine the meaning of heroism to
illustrate that common humanity transcended ethnic loyalties. Each
episode ended with a call-in segment during which listeners were
encouraged to tell their own stories of cross-ethnic life-saving. When
we launched the series, our staff members estimated they would
only be able to find enough material for about ten episodes. They
had no idea that the programs would unleash a flood of accounts
from all over the country and that this outpouring would keep the
weekly series on the air for six years.
A typical episode featured the story of individual heroes—for
example, Rebecca, a Tutsi who fended off armed men and saved
forty-one Hutus, said:

I did not protect them because I am a Tutsi or a Hutu. . . . We should not put
forward our own ethnic group, but rather our humanity. We are created by the
same God. We are the same people.

Another episode focused on Fulgence, a pupil in a school that was

attacked by militants who, like him, were Hutus. The attackers
demanded that the students separate into two groups, one of Tutsis
and the other of Hutus. The students realized that that those who
were identified as Tutsis would be killed, and they all refused to
reveal their ethnicity. Even after the attackers started to hack the
students with machetes and shoot them, the students would not
relent. In all, forty-two young people of both ethnicities died.
Fulgence was one of three survivors. “My ethnic group is the human
race,” he said. “We stayed together to the end.”
In 2004 the Pillars of Humanity series finally ended. Then, under
the leadership of Lena Slachmuijlder, the studio’s director at the
time, we sponsored a Heroes Summit to honor and showcase
people like Rebecca and Fulgence. The Summit was successful
beyond expectations. Internationally, ninety news articles appeared,
along with many radio and TV pieces. A high school teacher in St.
Louis, Missouri, contacted us to say he planned to integrate material
from the Summit into his World Religions class. We received a note
from a woman involved with recognizing Righteous Gentiles who had
saved the lives of Jews during World War II. She wrote, “Thank you
for your inspiration. You reminded me of our common humanity and
of the need to stop genocide wherever it happens.”
A Burundian high school principal wrote, “The Summit has had an
immeasurable impact. The world is full of people famous for their
bad deeds. There are others who act with their heart and faith, but
we hardly know them. What Studio Ijambo has done is to take these
numerous heroes from the shadows and present them in front of the
nation as the genuine flames of peace and reconciliation for
Burundi.” As Roger Conrad, a senior USAID official, noted, “You
have introduced the vocabulary of peace and reconciliation to the
national conversation at all levels, where previously only words of
hate and mistrust were heard.”
The Pillars of Humanity series used a documentary format. In
addition, we produced fictional drama, which we referred to as soap
opera for social change (figure 6.2). As a boy, I had listened avidly to
radio soaps—my favorites were The Lone Ranger and The Shadow.
By the time we worked in Burundi, radio drama had mostly
disappeared in the West, but I felt it would work well in Burundi
where radio remained the predominant medium. Our goal was to use
good storytelling to reach a mass audience with messages that rose
above hatred. We commissioned a well-known Burundian author,
Louise Sebazuri, to write scripts for a series called Our Neighbors,
Ourselves. For six years, the studio produced two shows a week,
completing 616 episodes that were broadcast on national radio.
Surveys found that the series was heard by 87 percent of the
population. Plotlines focused on two families, one Hutu and the other
Tutsi (although we never said which was which). They lived next to
each other, and the two mothers struggled to maintain a cooperative
relationship and protect their children from the devastation of
violence. A front-page Wall Street Journal article stated that the
series was designed “to show that it is possible to overcome the
mistrust that prevails between the minority Tutsi and majority Hutu
groups.”
FIGURE 6.2 Recording a radio soap opera segment.

At one point, for technical reasons, Burundi national radio failed

to broadcast a new episode. Soon armed soldiers appeared at
Studio Ijambo. Our staff members were understandably frightened.
But the soldiers said they had come in peace and wanted only to
obtain a tape of the missing show. They feared that the troops might
mutiny if they could not listen to the latest episode. Needless to say,
our staff gladly provided a copy.
Although we made no claim that common ground radio—in
Burundi or anywhere—had the power for good that its hate-filled
opposite had for evil, we believed that, over time, positive
programming had a substantial impact in defusing conflict. A poll
conducted for USAID found that 82 percent of Burundians thought
that Studio Ijambo greatly encouraged reconciliation. The
programming kept alive, in a very difficult environment, the idea that
there were real alternatives to violence. Indeed, ABC Nightline’s Ted
Koppel called Studio Ijambo “the voice of hope in Burundi.”
After the studio had been operating for almost two years, another
unforeseen event occurred that exemplified the Dunbar Factor. None
of our staff had ever thought to ask what we would do if a coup d’état
took place, but that is exactly what happened in 1996 when
Burundi’s military overthrew the country’s Hutu president and
replaced him with a Tutsi.
In addition to being appalled by the coup, we were shaken to
learn that it put at risk our whole program in Burundi. At that time,
USAID was still our sole funder, and we had no choice but to comply
with its directives. That put us in a vulnerable position, and we had
not considered all of the implications. Our overriding concern had
been to prevent bloodshed, and we had been glad to take support
from the U.S. government to accomplish this end. However, the coup
triggered the provision in U.S. law stating that whenever a military
takeover occurs USAID must suspend most of its funding. After the
coup, USAID notified us that we should shut down. We felt that this
was exactly the wrong time to end our programming. After all, the
coup and the ongoing violence were rooted in ethnic conflict that we
were working to defuse. We were convinced that we were needed
more now than ever.
We had to find some sort of work-around that would allow us to
stay open. Otherwise, we felt we were likely to lose most of what we
had accomplished. I quickly made a Hail Mary move. I sent a letter
directly to Brian Atwood, the overall head of USAID in Washington,
D.C. I asked for a waiver that would allow us to continue our
programs. My request bypassed at least four layers of USAID
bureaucracy. I figured that we had nothing to lose, and Brian was an
old friend with whom I had worked closely in my days as a Senate
aide. My appeal apparently hit the mark. Shortly thereafter we
received a waiver that meant we did not have to close.
Not only could we keep operating, but there was an unforeseen
result, which from our organizational perspective was highly positive.
No longer did we have to share the USAID budget with numerous
other NGOs that had been receiving USAID funds. After the coup,
USAID was supporting only Search and one other organization. As a
result, we soon were receiving a much larger share of the USAID
budget than ever before. Although the total amount of our grants
never amounted to more than $3 million a year, the funds we
received enabled us to greatly increase the scope of our activities.
For the first time, we had the means to work across an entire country
and to carry out what we called societal conflict prevention.
Obviously, it helped that Burundi was comparatively small—about
the same size as Maryland.
As we expanded, our activities stayed rooted in the simple idea
that undergirded our work from the beginning: Understand the
differences and act on the commonalities. Within that framework, we
built a diverse toolbox that included traditional conflict resolution
techniques such as mediation, facilitation, and training, along with
less conventional ones involving media production, music, dance,
sport, and community organizing.
One of our more innovative tools was what we called domestic
shuttle diplomacy. Henry Kissinger had pioneered shuttle diplomacy
by flying from one Middle East capital to another. To play a similar
mediating role—but without using an airplane—we brought in Jan
van Eck, a former ANC Member of the South African Parliament.
Susan had worked closely with him in the South African peace
process, and she had great confidence in him. In Burundi, van Eck
operated outside official structures to promote dialogue and solve
problems among leaders of conflicting factions. For his first two
years, we used our USAID grant to pay his salary. While we found
van Eck to be highly effective, he was too independent a soul for the
U.S. government, and at a certain point we were told we could no
longer keep him on the payroll. Since we had no other source of
funds, we had no way to provide for him. However, van Eck was not
deterred, and he remained committed to working for peace in
Burundi. For the next ten years, he somehow managed to find
sufficient funds—including his own personal money—to spend about
half his time in the country. Van Eck’s key to success was
persistence. He kept showing up, and he was generally regarded as
a trusted intermediary who maintained contact with virtually every
party to the conflict, including rebel leaders with whom almost no one
else was talking. He brokered many agreements—small and large—
and we continued to informally support his efforts. Here is what a
USAID-sponsored evaluation—carried out before we were ordered
to fire him—had to say about van Eck’s work:

Leaders on all sides of the political (and ethnic) divide credit the project with
helping, at a time when the idea of negotiations was unthinkable to either side. . . .
One senior participant went so far as to say that “the internal partnership we have
today, a thing we couldn’t imagine less than two years ago, is the fruit of a tree
gently planted and patiently watered by Jan van Eck.”

Our societal model called for our staff members to be immersed

in local culture. They needed to have a deep sense of where they
were. The conflicts in Burundi, as everywhere, were complex, and
we recognized that it took deep engagement to understand what was
happening and how to take preventive action. Expatriates could have
that kind of capacity, as Jan van Eck demonstrated, but we
recognized that the people with the deepest understanding were
those native to the country. In addition, we also brought in a few
expatriates who identified with neither ethnic group. We did not
employ people who would only parachute into the country for a short
stay. Like Jan van Eck, the internationals needed to be willing to
remain in Burundi for long periods of time.
A key part of our societal strategy was the Women’s Peace
Center. It brought together thousands of Tutsi and Hutu women to
promote dialogue and catalyze joint action (figure 6.3). Across
Burundi, the center supported about three hundred ethnically mixed
women’s associations and helped their members rebuild destroyed
communities. With violence erupting all over the country, it was one
of the few safe havens where women of both ethnicities could meet
and deal with shared concerns.
FIGURE 6.3 Women’s Peace Center solidarity event.

In Burundi, as in so many other countries, women were not seen

to be equal to men. In our view, much of the violence was fueled by
macho attitudes connected to saving face and seeking revenge. We
noted that men did most of the killing, and women were much more
open to reconciliation. One of our core ideas was to empower
women to be peacemakers. We never went so far as to use the
tactic featured in the Greek drama Lysistrata—to have the women
withhold sex until the men made peace—but that tactic certainly
occurred to us and provided a metaphorical backdrop for our work.
The following account of two extraordinary ladies, Léonie
Barakomeza and Yvonne Ryakiye, exemplifies the activities of the
Women’s Peace Center. These two women were born in the same
locality, but they did not know each other. When fighting broke out in
1993 and their communities were destroyed, Barakomeza and her
fellow Tutsis fled to one side of a river; Ryakiye and the Hutus went
to the other side. In 1996, the two met through the Women’s Peace
Center, and they began working together. Unlike most of their
neighbors, they were willing to cross the river that separated them.
Accused of being traitors to their group, they persisted. Other women
followed their example, and links grew. They created a women’s
association and urged everyone to return home. Despite meager
means, they pooled resources and built forty brick houses for both
Hutu and Tutsi families. Their efforts were recognized, along with
eight other Burundian women, when they were nominated for the
2005 Nobel Peace Prize.
Among the targets of our societal approach were young, male
militia members who were paid a few dollars a day by political
leaders to attack and generally terrorize the other ethnic group. In
1999, we formed a partnership with a Burundian NGO called JAMAA
to launch an initiative to reintegrate and rehabilitate young Tutsi and
Hutu fighters, mostly child soldiers. We originally called this effort the
Working with Killers project, but we soon dropped that incendiary
name, even though it accurately described what we were doing. The
name was not supportive of our goal of helping participants leave
behind their bloody pasts and create a better future.
The project represented a stretch for us because we were
working directly with young men who had committed horrendous
deeds. Why did we deal with these people?—because they were at
the heart of the conflict. Our job in Burundi was not to make
judgments but to facilitate peacemaking. A key part of our strategy
was to give these young men a chance to speak, to compare
experiences, and as incredible as it may seem, to build trust. We
came to see that Tutsi and Hutu participants were mirror images of
each other. Both groups reflected fear, mistrust, and negative
stereotypes.
The project started with two Hutus and two Tutsis who had
served in opposing militias. These four had all undergone something
of a catharsis by telling their stories in a documentary film produced
by Bryan Rich, Studio Ijambo’s first director, and Alexis Sinduhije,
one of the studio’s original reporters. With our support and that of
JAMAA, they invited many of their fellow militiamen to participate in
an overnight workshop that brought together thirty-six young men
from both sides of the ethnic divide. Participants spent the first
evening eating, playing cards, listening to music, and watching a
movie on teen violence. As time passed, it became clear that no one
wanted to go to bed. The adult facilitators finally decided that they
needed to force the issue. There was silence. We had not foreseen
that the youth would feel it was foolhardy to sleep in the same
building with people they were afraid would murder them. This fear
of being physically at risk was completely outside of our experience,
and it was another example of the Dunbar Factor. Our staff members
had not thought to ask questions about whether the participants
would find the sleeping arrangements to be acceptable. They didn’t
know that they didn’t know how to handle the situation. The lesson
learned was that whenever we worked with people with blood on
their hands particular attention had to be given to convincing
participants that they were safe from attack.
Around midnight, a work-around emerged. Assurances from the
adults, plus fatigue, won out, and the group agreed to go to bed. In
the morning, having survived the night, the young men looked at
each other with fresh eyes. First they played soccer, and then they
gathered in a circle. For an hour, they spoke in generalities until one
of them declared, “This is a joke! We’re not here to discuss what we
heard happened; we’re here to talk about us!” What followed was an
animated exchange of shocking stories. Participants described the
atrocities in which they had been involved—for example, watching
victims die gruesome deaths and seeing family members executed.
Being exposed to such atrocities had pushed many of them to seek
violent revenge. Nevertheless, the group was able to discover an
important point of common ground: namely, both the Tutsi and the
Hutu militiamen felt they had been exploited by political leaders who
had paid them to be killers.
In the end, participants agreed to organize interethnic soccer
matches and to sponsor small-scale economic development
projects. This group became the nucleus of our youth activities. We
contributed funding, provided platforms for them to express
themselves, and explained our suggestions about process.
Participants went on to produce a comic book called Le Meilleur
Choix (The Best Choice) that described the origins of the violence
and encouraged other young people not to be manipulated by
unscrupulous politicians. The comic books were so compelling that
Burundi’s Ministry of Education printed tens of thousands and made
the comics part of the curriculum for the country’s schools.
This use of comics reached young people in a language that was
familiar and accessible to them. It was yet another example of our
efforts to speak to our target audience in their own idiom. Because
violent conflict in Burundi, as in so many places, depended on mass
stereotyping, demonizing, and dehumanizing, we believed that
popular culture could play a key part in reversing the process. We
recognized that conflict was rarely an intellectual exercise, and we
were convinced of the need to reach people on an emotional level.
We believed that conflict prevention had to operate on both the head
and the heart.
Much of Studio Ijambo’s programming reflected this insight. The
studio even employed a full-time disc-jockey who produced music-
for-peace programs. As an added touch, we enlisted the Jamaican
Rastafarian reggae star Ziggy Marley, who had a huge following in
Burundi, to record PSAs. We also recognized that, above all, in
Burundi popular culture involved drumming and dancing. So we
organized national drumming competitions and held giant music
festivals in Bujumbura.
In sum, societal conflict prevention in Burundi required us to be
weavers. Our task was to knit together multiple strands to help mend
a country that was torn and broken. As an independent evaluator
said in a report to USAID, “This entrepreneurial, risk-taking approach
should be seen as a model for future interventions in conflict
situations.”
For us at Search, Burundi was the operational proving ground for
societal conflict prevention, and we subsequently adapted the overall
concept and many of the specific activities to our work in other
countries—in full recognition that each place is different, with its own
unique history and culture. In our view, about 50 percent of our
toolbox worked in other places, and 50 percent did not—and we
never knew in advance which 50 percent was which. For us, the
keys were creativity and agility. We were convinced that
standardized, off-the-shelf approaches were much less likely to be
effective than customized ones, but we almost always found
similarities between countries. Everywhere there was a storytelling
tradition that we could integrate into our media programming, and
everywhere people in conflict saw themselves as victims.
We regarded peace as a process, not an event. It needed to be
“patiently watered”—as a Burundian official had put it in describing
peace agreements that were brokered by Jan van Eck. Although we
appreciated—and yearned for—those wonderful moments when
agreements were signed, we recognized that real peace required
more than signatures. Even if top leaders were able to reach
agreement, for peace to take hold, we believed the majority of
people had to want the violence to end. Thus we sought to create an
environment across Burundi in which citizens could step back from
fear. To counter extremism, we encouraged moderation, and we
made maximum use of indigenous wisdom.
As we moved our societal approach into other places, we
adapted the methodologies we had put into play in Burundi. We
replicated Studio Ijambo under the name of Talking Drum Studio in
Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Participatory community theater,
which we developed on a small scale in Burundi, became a huge hit
in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where our drama troupes used
theater to resolve local conflicts in front of audiences that totaled
more than two million people. Some Burundian projects, such as
national drumming contests, would not have traveled well, and we
did not try them elsewhere. But everywhere we worked, we followed
the Burundian example of inventing new forms of societal
programming that fit with local sensibilities.
Most of the work we did in Burundi took place at the grassroots
level, and it can be described as bottom-up. At the same time, we
recognized the extraordinary importance of top-down peacemaking.
We came to see that bottom-up and top-down approaches were
complementary, and that each was more likely to be successful
when the other was present. We believed that our societal work
played a key role in creating an environment inside Burundi that was
supportive of the official peace negotiations held at Arusha in
Tanzania. These talks were led first by Julius Nyerere, the former
president of Tanzania. After Nyerere died in 1999, South Africa’s
Nelson Mandela took over and guided the Burundians to a political
settlement, which included national elections and interethnic power
sharing.
Unfortunately, neither that agreement nor our bottom-up efforts
resolved all of Burundi’s problems, and many political leaders
refused to abandon their zero-sum approaches. Burundi remains
fragile. But compared to 1995 when the country was on the brink of
genocide, extraordinary progress has been made. An outside
evaluator for USAID summed up our role in the process this way:

These early accomplishments and the well-recognized SFCG call to “leave your
ethnicity at the door,” combined with the distinction of being one of the few
international organizations to stay on in Burundi throughout the crisis, have
established SFCG with an extraordinarily high degree of credibility and trust.
USAID, and the other program funders, are to be commended for demonstrating
the flexibility, responsiveness, and vision to move swiftly and decisively in
launching these activities, even in the face of major uncertainties about the shape
they were to ultimately take. This entrepreneurial, risk-taking approach should be
seen as a model for future interventions in conflict situations.

OceanofPDF.com
 7
Make Yesable Propositions

R
oger Fisher and William Ury wrote about “yesable
proposition” in their landmark book Getting to Yes. Principle
#7 of social entrepreneurship is “make yesable propositions.”
The concept is not complicated. Indeed, it is so simple I have found
that many people brush it off as childish.
A “yesable” proposition is a proposal shaped so that the person
to whom it is addressed responds “yes.” When people—children or
adults—internalize the idea and make it a regular part of their
interaction with others, the results can be life-changing. When I first
heard of the concept, I had to ask myself frequently if a proposition
was yesable. Over time, however, I internalized the practice to the
point that it has become second nature to me.
For a proposition to be yesable, it should include the needs and
interests not only of the proposer but of the recipient. If the
proposition is only acceptable to the proposer, it is likely to be turned
down. If it is only OK with the recipient, it probably reflects
pandering.
Here is an example on the personal level. My wife strongly
dislikes violent films and TV shows. If I suggest that we watch a
violence-filled Quentin Tarantino film, she will definitely refuse. If I
had overwhelming power, which I don’t, or if there were something
else that she very much wanted in return from me, she might
grudgingly go along. Nevertheless, an agreement based on a power
disparity or on a lopsided trade-off is not likely to be sustainable.
However, if I put myself into her shoes and recall that she likes
historical English drama, I might propose that we watch The Crown.
To this proposition, she will almost certainly say “yes.” Since I also
enjoy historical drama, we will have found a win-win solution.
The ability to make yesable propositions is useful to everyone.
However, it is especially important for social entrepreneurs. To be
adept at making such propositions, social entrepreneurs must
understand their own needs as well as those of the parties with
whom they are dealing. In this way, they can increase the possibility
that they will be able to move their activities forward and raise
enough money to implement their vision.
Whenever social entrepreneurs apply for funds, it is clearly in
their interest to receive a positive reply. The chances that this will
happen usually increase if they craft their proposal with substance
and language that appeal to the potential donor. It is usually a good
idea to include the donor’s preferred buzzwords and to cite past
successes. Above all, a yesable proposal should fall within the
guidelines and interests of the person or institution to which it is
addressed. No matter how brilliant the construct or how significant
the would-be result, seeking contributions for activities not consistent
with a donor’s priorities tends to be a fool’s errand. For example, an
entity that funds activities only inside the United States will almost
never support international projects; and a donor who concentrates
on public health issues is unlikely to fund voters’ rights projects.
Philanthropists and investors provide money in accordance with their
own priorities—not the social entrepreneur’s. One New York
foundation supports two—and only two—causes: LGBTQ+ rights
and the great apes of Africa. The only possible connection is that
both of these issues are of great importance to the person who put
up the money in the first place, and that person clearly has disparate
interests.
Social entrepreneurs can gain insight into the priorities of
possible funders by thoroughly googling them. The idea is to dig
deep for information that might provide the background for a
prospective request. In addition, social entrepreneurs should try to
meet funders and establish personal connections. Admittedly, in a
time of pandemics and Zoom encounters, face-to-face sessions are
often difficult to arrange, but they are definitely worth the trouble.
Some donors simply don’t want to give out information. In fact,
USAID and the European Union have rules against sharing data
beyond what is in their calls for proposals, and they will usually not
meet with outside organizations that have already submitted
proposals. The best time to talk to them is before they have issued
their calls for proposals.
An additional way to learn about a funder is to query other
organizations that have previously been supported by that particular
donor. I have found that the most productive method for obtaining
information from others is to accept the premise that fund-raising—
like life—does not have to be a zero-sum game. In other words, to
get information, social entrepreneurs should be willing to give
information. Not only will sharing possible leads enhance their
popularity, but on a practical level being tight-fisted about helping
others almost never works well. To put it another way, what goes
around tends to come around.
There is another aspect to fund-raising that is completely
commonsensical. I call it the Willie Sutton principle. Sutton, known
as Slick Willie, was a famous Brooklyn-based bank robber. After the
police captured him, he reportedly gave a press conference during
which he was asked why he robbed banks. He said the answer was
very simple: “That’s where the money is.” For social entrepreneurs,
the takeaway is that money can only be found where there actually is
money and where those possessing it are inclined to donate or
invest it.
Making yesable propositions is also important when putting
together new projects. Whether launching a campaign or lobbying for
change, the ideas being presented need to be sufficiently attractive
to the target audience to prompt an affirmative response. Social
entrepreneurs should be able to enroll others in their activities and
bring well-placed individuals into their orbit. Inviting Middle
Easterners to a meeting in Paris in the springtime is a much more
likely path for having them accept than asking them to travel in the
dead of winter to Helsinki—although I once was successful in
enticing Arabs and Israelis to come to the latter city in January.
 By necessity, during the first years of Search, I was the
entrepreneur-in-chief, and I ran the organization from what might be
called the seat of my pants. In 1994, after my new wife Susan joined
me, Search had dual entrepreneurs. At that time, we employed about
a dozen people, and the organization was growing rapidly in both
numbers of staff and the scale of work. One result of this growth was
the need for substantial changes in how we operated. No longer
were Susan and I able to know everything that was happening
across the organization, and the administrative burdens were
increasing. Our staff was—rightly—concerned about such things as
health benefits, pension plans, and vacation days. We needed to
update our financial systems, and we even heard requests for an
employees’ manual. We were at a point where we needed to answer
two key questions: Did we really want to keep growing? Would
administrative and financial requirements prevent Susan and me
from being free to do the conflict prevention work that we loved?
Susan and I had a long discussion about Search’s future—and
our own. We concluded that we wanted to be agents of global
transformation, and to make a difference on that scale we needed to
build a comparatively large organization. Otherwise we did not think
we would have the ability to address major conflicts. Armed with this
reasoning, we opted for continued expansion despite the
administrative obstacles we knew we would face. We vowed to build
an organization with sufficient structure to function efficiently, but not
with so much bureaucracy that it thwarted creativity and innovation.
This was easier said than done.
One upshot of our conversation was the realization that Search
would need to employ multiple social entrepreneurs in addition to the
two of us. We would require people who were skilled at making
yesable propositions that resulted in launching new initiatives and
the expansion of existing ones. I discovered that there is a word in
business literature for staff members who operate in this manner.
They are called intrapreneurs. Dictionary.com defines such people
as those who are “given freedom and financial support to create new
products, services, systems, etc. and [who do] not have to follow the
corporation’s usual routines or protocols.” Intrapreneurship was
clearly the quality we were looking for when we hired additional
senior staff.
Over the years, we brought in many people who displayed
intrapreneurial talents. One person who particularly stood out was
Lena Slachmuijlder. She began her Search career as the director of
Studio Ijambo in Burundi. It was she who conceived and brought to
life the Heroes Summit described in chapter 6. In 2005, we
transferred her from Burundi to the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC) to serve as our country director.
Susan had led us into the DRC four years earlier and established
our first presence there. This central African country, which was the
setting of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, proved to be a very
difficult place to work. Its history of colonialism, dictatorship, and war
had led to millions of deaths, had devastated the infrastructure, and
had a huge negative impact on the social fabric. When Slachmuijlder
took over, we were working mainly to support the country’s peace
process. Because the DRC was split between zones controlled by
the government and several rebel groups, we had two offices—one
in Kinshasa, the capital, and one in Bukavu, in the wild east.
Slachmuijlder turned out to be particularly good at making yesable
propositions for funding. On her watch, we were able to open five
additional offices around the DRC; our staff grew to one hundred
people; the budget quintupled to $5.2 million a year; and the
program became our largest anywhere in the world. Thus we were
able to implement a societal approach despite the vastness of the
DRC, which is about the size of the United States east of the
Mississippi.
Slachmuijlder’s work demonstrated how prolonged engagement
and showing up were such important qualities in social
entrepreneurship—and social intrapreneurship. However, all good
things had to end, and in 2011, after six years in the DRC, she
decided that she wanted a change. We did not want to lose her, so
we made her an offer she did not refuse. She accepted a new
position as Search’s chief programming officer based in Washington,
D.C., and she became a member of our senior management team.
Just before she left the DRC to take on these new duties, she invited
me to come and view firsthand what she had accomplished. As a
result, I made my first visit ever inside the DRC. (I had once before
made an hour’s stop in the Kinshasa airport.) I knew comparatively
little about what she had been doing because she reported to our
Africa director, not to me, and my focus was on the Middle East. But
I was curious about her activities, so I put aside a week to visit her
and said that I wanted to see as much as I possibly could. She
obliged and arranged a full schedule. In essence, she took me on a
trip through her greatest hits.
My visit started when I walked across the border from Burundi
into the eastern DRC, and Slachmuijlder met me. Our first stop was
in the nearby town of Uvira, where we visited the Search office. I had
never before even heard of Uvira, and I had no idea we even had an
office there. I tried to act knowledgeable while our office director,
whom I had never met before, briefed me on the work we were doing
to strengthen local government and aid the return of refugees.
From Uvira, we drove on an awful road to Lemera, an isolated
village where Swedish missionaries had once preached and had left
behind church buildings that seemed out of place among the green
hills of Africa. Local officials showed us the community radio station,
one of eighty-five of our partner stations for which we at Search were
producing twenty-two hours of original programming each week. As
in Burundi, we operated production studios, not stations. Internet
transmission was not yet possible, so CDs of our programs were
distributed by plane, bus, and motorcycle to stations around the
country. Although in Burundi we had only one production studio, in
the much larger DRC we had four, and we made programs in French
and four tribal languages.
FIGURE 7.1 The fictional Army officer Commandant Janvier.

One of our most popular radio series showcased a fictional,

villainous Army officer named Commandant Janvier (figure 7.1). The
series revolved around our conviction that we could use popular
culture to limit the widespread abuses that were regularly committed
by the Congolese Army. As a character, Commandant Janvier
embodied how a military man should not act. The series lasted for
ten years and consisted of hundreds of weekly episodes. We
increased its impact by widely distributing hundreds of thousands of
comic books that depicted the Commandant’s (mis)adventures. In
the process, the Commandant became the national archetype for a
loathsome military man. As one of our scriptwriters said, “If you
wanted to let someone know that he was doing something wrong,
you just called him a Commandant Janvier.”
In Lemera, I watched a participatory theater performance in the
village square. It was staged by one of our Search theater troupes,
and it was obviously scheduled for my benefit. However, it did not
represent a one-off, Potemkin Village-type event because
participatory theater was one of our signature techniques.
Slachmuijlder and a group of Congolese artists had developed the
form when they had combined our common ground approach with
Brazilian street theater techniques. They trained scores of actors and
actresses who put on thousands of shows that were viewed by more
than two million Congolese. The methodology was so effective in
resolving local conflicts that we expanded its use to Search
programs in several other countries.
The secret ingredient for these performances was to have the
actors create a new storyline for each locality. They did this by
arriving several hours early in the village where they were scheduled
to perform. Then they walked around, listened to conversations,
probed the villagers about the conflicts that were dividing the
community, and improvised a play that dramatized the key conflicts.
Next they restarted the play, paused after each scene, and asked
audience members how the characters might have been more
successful in dealing with the conflict. Finally, the performers invited
audience members to replace them and to act out better ways of
resolving the conflict.
After the performance in Lemera, I rode in a van with the actors
and actresses on the road to Bukavu. As we rattled along, they
shared their individual stories. One was a former child soldier who
described the immense pain he had experienced when he had
witnessed his parents being dragged away and murdered by a rebel
militia group. He said he had wanted to die. However, by joining
Search, he eventually found his calling. “I saw I wasn’t the only one,”
he discovered. “I wanted to give the peace I had found to others.”
 The next morning in Bukavu, I was taken to the Congolese
Army’s regional headquarters, where I watched a session to
sensitize a battalion of soldiers on the need for better behavior. This
also was not an isolated event staged on my behalf. Search was
carrying out thousands of similar sessions, which were facilitated by
military men we had trained. These sessions invariably opened up
discussions about shame, trauma, and vulnerability. They often
ignited a desire to change among participants. The goal was to
improve the conduct of soldiers who, deplorably, were among the
DRC’s prime perpetrators of human rights abuses, particularly
sexual violence against women. The DRC had become known as the
rape capital of the world, and huge numbers of women and girls had
been violated. Many, if not most, Congolese soldiers acted from the
mistaken belief that females were a rightful part of war plunder.
Under Slachmuijlder’s leadership, we were seeking to instill in the
poorly paid and poorly trained military the need to protect civilians—
not to harm them. In partnership with ECC-MERU, a Protestant
church-based NGO, we worked directly with the Army’s Civic and
Patriotic Education Service, whose mission included taking care of
the well-being of soldiers. The head of this service was General
Mulubi Bin Muhemedi, a decent man who was committed to
eliminating abusive behavior in the ranks. Unfortunately, before the
general started working with us, he had almost no resources to carry
out constructive programming.
Together, Slachmuijlder and the general designed a program that
sought to retrain the Congolese military and that later was extended
to the National Police (figure 7.2). It was called Tomorrow Is a New
Day, and it was a decentralized effort that followed the army’s
hierarchical lines. Each battalion or brigade formed a steering
committee of senior officers, chaplains, and liaison officers. With
initial funding from the UN High Commission for Refugees and
subsequently from the Dutch government, we launched twenty
steering committees and a full retraining effort in two provinces in the
eastern DRC.
FIGURE 7.2 Lena Slachmulder and General Mulubi stand among a class of Congolese
army trainees.

In both places, the initiative featured a full toolbox of

methodologies that included sensitization training, radio and video
programs, participatory theater, and instructional comic books. We
also sponsored solidarity activities that brought together soldiers and
civilians to carry out good works such as cleanups, repairs,
harvesting, and sporting events. The idea was to demonstrate to the
civilian population that the army could be a positive force in their
communities.
Whenever possible, we included soldiers’ wives in the training
programs. Many wives suffered from both spousal abuse and the
stigma of being married to military men, whom the general
population often held in low esteem because so many soldiers
displayed the kind of abhorrent behavior embodied on the radio by
Commandant Janvier. Virtually no wives supported their husbands
being rapists, and the husbands were more likely to realize the error
of their ways when their wives were present. One wife commented
that our retraining program “was a blessing for every soldier and
every soldier’s wife. I’ve seen my husband Henri change. He brings
the guidance into our home and shares it with his wife.” Added her
husband, “When my wife noticed I changed, she fell in love with me
again.”
After the Tomorrow Is a New Day program had been going for
about two years, we commissioned comprehensive evaluations in
the two provinces where the program had been used. We wanted to
know if we were on the right track. The evaluators found 92 percent
of the local population judged that abuses had been significantly
reduced, and 89 percent believed that due to joint military-civilian
activities there had been a marked decrease in forced labor, theft,
illegal arrest, extortion, and rape. Here are some quotes from local
civilians who were asked what they thought of our retraining efforts:

• If President Kabila wants peace, he should leave the military

deployed here in Bunyakiri. We are no longer afraid when we see
a military uniform.
• If these military leave our area, we will follow them. Then we
know we’ll be safe.
• Before, the civilians used to be able to manipulate the Military
Police to do bad things. But now they are disciplined and don’t
allow themselves to be used.

With those evaluations in hand, Slachmuijlder was able to

convince more funders to support expansion across the country, and
Tomorrow Is a New Day became a societal initiative. It eventually
reached the entire army, and more than 100,000 soldiers were
retrained.
Years later, I asked Slachmuijlder how she was able to get buy-in
from General Mulubi and the DRC military leadership. When she
began, she said, the Congolese Army was regularly condemned
because of the predatory and violent behavior of the troops. Faced
with a steady stream of criticism, the army usually reacted with
defensiveness and denial. To her credit, Slachmuijlder recognized
that there were people inside and outside the ranks who wanted
things to change, and she made a decision to work with the army—
not to accuse it—even if a large number of soldiers were guilty of
horrible abuses.
Regarding General Mulubi, Slachmuijlder said:

I was able to show him empathy. I listened a lot to his story. I understood that he had
a very hard job, but I also caught a glimpse of what he wished for. I didn’t need to
denounce the soldiers—nor would that have helped. . . . I said that I understood the
challenges he was facing, and I thought that we could help him achieve his aims. I
wanted him to feel safe and to understand that positive change could happen under
his leadership.
Yesable propositions were a critical part of making change. It was essential to
understand people’s needs and not just to try to get them to do what your project
proposal said they should do. When you did this, you realized that not everything
was about material needs; and that there were also other needs like reputation,
appreciation, connection, and trust. Many people thought change would occur in
accordance with log-frames.1 In my view, providing incentives was the key to
change. It was our role to design a program that let those incentives drive our work.

________________
1. A log-frame is the short name for a logical framework, a planning tool consisting of a
matrix that provides an overview of a project’s goals, activities, and anticipated results.
Donors are concerned with metrics, and they usually require detailed log-frames.

Because Tomorrow Is a New Day contained incentives for key

players, it was yesable to both the Congolese military and the
international community. For General Mulubi, the program provided
sufficient resources to make him relevant and to stop conduct of
soldiers that he found repugnant. For the army’s general staff, which
needed to give its approval, the program deflected international
criticism and increased the professionalism of the troops. For
Western governments that provided funding and needed to show
their parliaments that they were not wasting taxpayers’ money, the
program produced quantifiable results that were verified by
independent evaluators. For the soldiers who became the trainers
and facilitators of the sensitization sessions, the program allowed
them to do the right thing and to gain a certain degree of status. In
addition, they earned pocket money, occasional fuel for motorcycles,
and a modest amount of office supplies. For the soldiers in the field,
in addition to being instructed in international standards of conduct,
the program furnished small but tangible inducements, such as time
off from normal duties and large quantities of Fanta orange soda—a
delicacy in Congolese terms that was regularly served at
sensitization sessions.
To understand the impact that Tomorrow Is a New Day has had,
please consider what happened with the Congolese Army’s 811th
Brigade. Before entering our retraining program, the 811th had an
appalling record of theft, rape, and murder. Then the brigade went
through thirty-six sensitization sessions that involved 1,026 soldiers,
and forty-six officers who were instructed in the need to end impunity
for human rights violations. In March 2013, the retrained 811th was
deployed to the Katanga region. It was encamped at the Lubumbashi
airport when a rebel Mai Mai militia attacked the city. The brigade
was ordered to counterattack. For the first time in its history, the
brigade carried out an armed operation without committing abuses.
“We had the option of exterminating them,” said Colonel Prince, the
commander. “It could have been done within two hours—but given
our recent background in human rights and international
humanitarian law, we proceeded differently. This is why we
systematically encircled them and summoned them to surrender. We
are not a terror arm anymore.” Added Anne Mutong, a Katangan civil
society leader, “This time, I am proud of those soldiers that saved the
city without any major collateral damage. They acted like
professionals, and they really protected the population.”
From Bukavu, the next stop for Slachmuijlder and me was Goma,
sixty-two miles away at the other end of Lake Kivu. However, the
road to Goma was barely passable, and the quickest way to make
the trip was by commercial speedboat, called the Fast Ferry, that
required a chilly, three-hour ride down the lake. I had never imagined
I would be cold in the tropical DRC, but I shivered in a T-shirt all the
way to Goma.
In Goma I met with two Dutch filmmakers, Ilse and Femke van
Velzen (figure 7.3). They were identical twins who had produced
Breaking the Silence, a documentary about rape in the DRC. The
film aimed to overcome the societal taboo that prevented rape
victims from talking about sexual violence. In the DRC women were
frequently blamed for having been raped. Indeed, victims were
regularly chased out of their homes by irate husbands and shamed
into silence.
FIGURE 7.3 The Van Velzen sisters, Dutch filmmakers.

The film had been well-received in the West and had won awards
at festivals, but the van Velzens very much wanted it also to have an
impact in the DRC. There were virtually no cinemas or TV stations
outside the major cities, so the van Velzens partnered with us to
distribute the film through mobile cinema showings. These featured a
large, inflated, plastic screen that was usually set up in an open field.
The film itself was shown by a video projector powered by a gasoline
generator. The result looked something like a drive-in movie—except
no one was in a car and the audience stood up to watch. In the
entertainment-starved Congolese countryside, screenings attracted
as many as 10,000 people, and our total audience was in the
millions.
That night in a field outside Goma, I attended a mobile cinema
showing of the van Velzen film. It was a powerful experience for me
—and clearly cathartic for many in the crowd. I couldn’t understand
the soundtrack, which was in the local tribal language, but I could tell
by the gasps and screams from the audience that the testimony on-
screen from rape victims had a profound impact. After the film
ended, our Congolese staff used microphones and loudspeakers to
encourage local women to share their experiences, and many came
forward with their own accounts of gender-based violence.
Because the van Velzens’ film was so effective in reaching its
audience, we decided to double-down and partner with the two
sisters in adapting their next film, Weapon of War: Confessions of
Rape in Congo, for use in our sensitization sessions for Congolese
security forces. The sisters edited a new version, and it became an
integral part of our program to retrain the Congolese Army and
police.
When I arrived back in Goma, I had a very productive meeting
with Ben Knapen, the Dutch Minister for International Cooperation,
who was visiting some of his country’s foreign aid projects. His
ministry was already funding our programs in a major way, and I did
not want to overload his systems by asking for more money. So I
made what I thought was a yesable proposition that would be of
great value to us and that would put Dutch officials into a leadership
position among potential donors—and not cost them anything. My
suggestion was for the Netherlands to convene other donors and
encourage them to support us in expanding Tomorrow Is a New Day
across the entire DRC. Sure enough, within a month I received an
email from the Foreign Ministry in The Hague saying that Dutch
diplomats had started to push the project with the British and
Canadian aid agencies and that they planned to convene a meeting
“to persuade” other donors to invest in our work. Although I cannot
know what, if any, direct impact this Dutch assistance may have had,
I am sure their support didn’t hurt our standing with the rest of the
funding community, and in the following months we received several
large new grants.
The next day, Slachmuijlder and I flew on a UN plane to Kinshasa
where we made a courtesy call on General Mulubi. I thanked him
profusely for his seminal role in the Tomorrow Is a New Day
program. Next, Slachmuijlder took me to meet with Search’s TV
production team. Although our media activities in the DRC began
with radio, under her leadership we had expanded into television,
which had a wide viewership in the DRC’s twelve major cities. In
Kinshasa alone, our programs reached about two million viewers.
With TV as with radio, we functioned as a production studio, not a
broadcaster.
With justifiable pride, our production team showed me samples of
their output. One offering was a thirteen-episode dramatic series
about the police. The hero was not a Commandant Janvier–type.
Instead, he was a good cop who tried to do his job properly and who
continually battled corruption and indifference. Every day he had to
make difficult choices as he tried to act in an honest and upright way.
Having made Commandant Janvier into a national villain, we wanted
to create an even more powerful image of a policeman who acted in
an exemplary way.
Our production team was also excited about a campaign
underway to counter toxic masculinity. The goal was to popularize
the idea that a Congolese could be a real man by respecting women
and by saying “no” to exploitation and violence. Instead of
condemning bad behavior, this series showed in positive ways that
real men did not abuse women. Our short films were narrated by a
well-known Congolese rapper, Celeo Scram, who drew the audience
into the kind of situation that would typically lead to sexual violence
(figure 7.4). However, no matter what the audience anticipated, in
our films the storylines took a contrarian turn. In those days, well
before #MeToo, we wanted to show how, even in a macho culture,
masculinity did not require abusiveness. For instance, one film told
the story of a young woman who was applying for a job in an office.
She was afraid that the man who interviewed her had ulterior
motives when he asked her to meet him in a hotel room that
evening. Unfortunately, forcing women to have sex in return for
employment was—and is—a common practice in the DRC. In our
script, however, there was an unexpected ending. It turned out that
the man had invited the woman to the hotel not for prurient reasons
but to meet the office recruitment panel.
FIGURE 7.4 Celeo Scram: Are you a real man?

In addition, staff members described another series Search was

producing. It was called Tosalel’ango (Let’s Do It in Lingala), and it
was the first reality series ever in the DRC. It showcased young
people tackling actual problems in their community. Shows
demonstrated that it was possible to promote positive social change
despite challenging conditions in the DRC. When we surveyed
viewers to find out if this goal was being met, 98 percent answered
that it was.
One episode of Tosalel’ango featured two female students
named Jenny and Filston. Like most young women in the country,
they had grown up in an environment where gender-based violence
was endemic, and schoolgirls like them were frequent targets.
Unscrupulous male teachers often pressured girls to trade sexual
favors for passing marks. (The practice was informally known as
sexually transmitted grades.) Jenny and Filston were convinced that
something needed to be done about their predatory teachers, but
they understood that directly approaching the authorities at their
school or in their locality was probably not going to be effective. They
reasoned that a way to make a yesable proposition to the powers
that be was to appear on television and have the problem graphically
displayed to a mass audience. They contacted the producers of
Tosalel’ango and worked with our production team to make an
episode about the abuses they had personally suffered and about
the larger question of sexual violence in Congolese schools. In this
way, the girls were able to shame the authorities into action. After the
episode was aired, the local police commander agreed to meet with
them, and criminal charges were brought against four of their
teachers. Tosalel’ango had called attention to a major societal
problem, and Congolese teachers were put on notice that they could
not continue to escape punishment when they committed crimes
against their students.
After the session with the Search TV team, Slachmuijlder took
me to meet the director of the television station in Kinshasa that was
broadcasting Tosalel’ango. He praised the series heavily and said he
wanted more such programming. We had clearly made him a
proposition that was yesable both to him and to us. Here was the
deal: We provided his station with popular, high-quality programming
at no cost. In return, he agreed to broadcast the shows in prime time,
and we at Search were able to reach a mass urban audience with
programs that featured the ideas and values we wanted to
communicate. Our donors were willing to say “yes” to our requests
for funding because they were pleased with the effectiveness of what
we were doing. It was definitely a win-win-win.
The TV station was my last stop on what was for me a magical
mystery tour through the DRC. I witnessed the kind of work I had
envisioned that Search would accomplish when I founded the
organization. Particularly satisfying was the fact that—without direct
input from me—Slachmuijlder had accomplished so much. I
recognized that she had worked within the context of my vision and
that she couldn’t have done it without the organizational base Search
provided. Like most successful social entrepreneurs and
intrapreneurs, she had forged ahead when she saw openings, and to
paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “she did it her way.”
 For the next year or two, I dined out on what I had witnessed in
the DRC. I was proud to explain that Slachmuijlder had confirmed an
idea I had strongly held to be true but had never before been able to
verify: namely, that a societal approach to conflict prevention could
work well in a geographically large country, and that even in a place
as lawless as the DRC, skillfully crafted, yesable propositions could
result in positive social change.

OceanofPDF.com
 8
Practice Aikido

B
y nature, I am impatient. As a peacemaker and as a human
being, I yearn for rapid outcomes to problems that are tearing
apart the planet. In places like the Democratic Republic of
Congo and Burundi, where my colleagues and I worked, there was
widespread violence, and we were committed to doing everything we
possibly could to end it. We understood, however, that even though
we were the world’s largest NGO in the peace-building field we were
still a relatively small organization, and we lacked the power to
reverse the course of events. As much as we opposed violence
based on ethnic, religious, and gender differences, we realized that it
was usually futile to take a confrontational stance. Literally and
figuratively, screaming “STOP NOW!” only seemed to make matters
worse.
If we had taken a directly adversarial position, we would have
been acting like a boxer who tries to reverse the energy flow of an
opponent—by knocking that person backward onto his or her rear
end. We were convinced that such an approach was not an effective
way to deal with conflicts—or with much of life, for that matter.
Instead, we adopted a strategy rooted in aikido, a noncompetitive
Japanese martial art (which literally translates as “the way of spirit
harmony”). Aikido emphasizes accepting an attacker’s incoming
energy and awareness rather than countering with force and
resistance. When we were involved in trying to end a violent conflict,
we accepted as a given that we did not have the power to achieve
our goal. We understood that we could only shift the conflict by ten
or fifteen degrees, and we were always looking for innovative ways
to cause that to happen. In essence, we were making a virtue out of
necessity because we simply did not have the clout to act otherwise.
In aikido, the process of accepting the approach of an attacker
and then diverting it is called the blend. It requires the practitioner to
shift the attacking energy in a relatively small way—not to try, as a
boxer would, to reverse it by 180 degrees. The result is to create a
new situation in which the attacker and the individual being attacked
both wind up in a position of safety. In my view, aikido offers an
important conceptual metaphor for social entrepreneurs. They need
to accept a situation as it is, blend with it, and transform it one step
at a time.
I tried practicing aikido in the physical sense at a dojo, a place
where martial arts were taught, but I did not like having my 6’3”
frame thrown around on a mat—even though I knew I would be safe
in the end. However, I realized that employing the core ideas that
underlay aikido provided a key strategy—a modus operandi—for
how social entrepreneurs could effectively operate and resolve
conflicts. Principle #8 of social entrepreneurship is “practice aikido.”
Lena Slachmuijlder used an aikido-type tactic in the DRC.
Instead of directly confronting the Congolese Army and denouncing
its atrocious record in abusing human rights, she accepted the army
as it was and found small openings that eventually led to major
change. Her nonadversarial methodology enabled her and her
colleagues to carry out a program that retrained virtually the
country’s entire military. Wrestling diplomacy with Iran represented
another example of aikido. Although it didn’t directly take on the core
problems between the United States and Iran, it opened up new
possibilities for improving relations.
In Morocco, we also took an aikido-laden approach. We wanted
to promote social and economic cohesion in the country. Instead of
directly opposing the massive injustices and inequalities that existed
there, we sought to shift the processes by which Moroccans resolved
conflicts. Our goal was to create a culture in which disputes were
resolved peacefully and in an equitable way.
 Our program in Morocco began in the year 2000 at a time when
the country was going through a major transition. Hassan II, the
previous king, had died the year before. His son, Mohammed VI,
was inclined, at least initially, to let a thousand flowers bloom as he
tried to correct what the BBC called his father’s “appalling human
rights record.” As Morocco was moving rapidly toward a more open
political system, the country was experiencing the tensions that
normally accompany processes of social change and
democratization.
With all this going on, we received an unsolicited request to work
in Morocco from Habib Belkouch, the director of the Ministry of
Justice’s Human Rights Center for Documentation, Information &
Training. Belkouch had himself been imprisoned and tortured under
the old regime. Now that he had been released and had become a
government official, he believed that direct confrontation with the
past was less likely to be successful than a more indirect approach.
In other words, he had adopted a strategy that was consistent with
aikido. He had learned about our work by participating in the Human
Rights Working Group of our Middle East initiative. This group
included Arabs, Israelis, and Iranians who cooperated to correct
human rights abuses. He invited us to launch similarly inclusive
programs in Morocco. His immediate target was the country’s
system for resolving labor disputes, which reflected long-standing
adversarial patterns. After several preliminary visits, in 2001 we
decided to open an office in Rabat, the capital city and begin a full
program.
There had been a series of terrorist bombings in Morocco, but the
country was mostly peaceful. The monarchy, whose lineage could be
traced directly back to the Prophet Muhammad, was firmly in power.
Several people asked us why Search, as a peace-building
organization, chose to operate in a country where there was little
violence. We answered that if nonviolent methods of dealing with
differences were not applied to alleviate poverty and unrest, violence
would eventually break out. We operated from the premise that the
best time to prevent conflict was before it reached crisis proportions
—in accordance with the old saying that “a stitch in time saves nine.”
In addition, if the methodology existed in a country to peacefully
resolve contentious issues, we believed there was a good chance
that it would be used. On the other hand, if methodology of this sort
was not present, we surmised it almost certainly would not be
brought to bear when conflicts arose.
Our presence was welcomed by Moroccan authorities, and they
were more than willing to work with us. After all, Morocco was a
country where absolute power rested with the monarchy, and our
approach, which stressed win-win solutions and peaceful
coexistence, was not threatening to the powers that be. We wanted
to bring about profound change by gently shifting the way Moroccans
dealt with their differences but without confrontation. Our approach
represented aikido in action.
Disputes in Morocco traditionally had been dealt with by old and
wise local leaders—mostly tribal chiefs and imams—who served as
arbitrators and mediators between conflicting parties. They were
called judges, and they were elected every three years, usually only
by men who were over the age of forty. Many were paid by the
government to go to their town’s souk (marketplace) every week and
resolve problems. Their rulings on issues such as quarrels over
money, land ownership, and water rights were not legally binding,
but the judges usually were able to find solutions. As Morocco had
modernized, however, this ancient system for conflict resolution had
mostly disappeared. We thought it was possible to reintroduce this
methodology by combining it with contemporary techniques of
mediation. At the same time, we needed to make sure that such a
combination would not be too caught up in cultural biases. We tried
to find the right mix between old and new, Moroccan and Western.
With funding from the U.S. State Department and the UK
government, our first project was to support passage of a new labor
law. The existing law was heavily weighted in favor of management,
and it was usually backed up by government pressure against the
workers. We carried out a series of consultations with key parties to
determine the shape of a new law, and we provided training in more
equitable forms of labor negotiations. We brought international
negotiation experts to Morocco, and we organized study trips to
Washington, D.C. and London of key players from government,
unions, and management. Our activities were designed to build
consensus around provisions of labor legislation that would be less
adversarial than the existing law and would establish a fairer system
of collective bargaining. In the end, our work directly contributed to
passage of an updated labor law. This new law specifically included
mediation as a means for resolving workplace disputes. As Oussama
Safa, our country director in Morocco at the time, put it, “We were
the catalysts in passing it.”
In addition, we promoted mediation in the bidonvilles, the
poverty-wracked shantytowns on the outskirts of Casablanca and
other large cities. These places were breeding grounds for
radicalism. One of our first projects was in Sidi Moumen, a slum area
where there had been several suicide bombings that exploded not
far from the cosmopolitan center of Casablanca. Our core premise
was that the attackers in Sidi Moumen were driven by problems
caused by poverty, unemployment, and ideology, and we would
provide tools for tackling these problems. We needed to overcome
the hostility that separated the have-nots from the haves in
communities like this. We saw such efforts as key to providing
opportunity and lifting up those at risk, particularly young people. In
partnership with the Moroccan government’s Initiative for Human
Development, we created community mediation centers in Sidi
Moumen and in two other slum neighborhoods. We also provided
training in mediation and coaching to 105 youth leaders.
“Mediation helps us resolve conflicts in a nonviolent manner,”
said twenty-two-year-old Zachariah who went through our training, “I
want to show others that it can change their lives.” Zachariah spoke
in the face of skepticism from fellow community members who
doubted that mediation would make any difference, but he and the
other young mediators persisted. They carried out an awareness-
raising campaign to show young people that there were alternatives
to frustration and violence. The idea was to make Sidi Moumen into
a more hopeful place. There was a profound need for change to
enable people within the community to shape their destiny. Before
the bombings “Sidi Moumen was ignored,” said Hanan, another
twenty-two-year-old. “I would like to show that within our community
we have some very educated, intelligent, and motivated people.”
 When Susan Collin Marks and I made a site visit to one of the
community centers Search had started, we talked at length with
young mediators. They explained, step by step, how Searchers had
taught them the finer points of mediation. Susan told them they were
doing exactly what she did in her work, often at the highest levels of
international affairs. Astonished and delighted, they beamed and
poured out stories of their successes. One girl told us how she had
been able to mediate between pupils and teachers—and even pupils
and their parents. This was a big deal in Morocco’s hierarchical
society, where young people—particularly girls—did not normally
become involved in a significant way with adults. As one of the
youthful mediators said, “Our lives are completely different now.
They are different in everything—in school, in associations, and in
our families.” In the words of a young woman, “Before it seemed that
power and authority were the best mechanism for resolving disputes,
and mediation was the domain for the authorities and tribal leaders.
Now there is equality between people in mediation as a new way of
conflict resolution.”
In all, the young mediators were successful in using mediation to
resolve more than one thousand cases with a success rate that at
times reached nearly 90 percent. Of the mediated cases, 60 percent
were school conflicts, 25 percent were neighborhood conflicts, and
15 percent were family conflicts. Our youthful colleagues established
mediation cells at five high schools in Casablanca, and they founded
their own organization, Association Marocaine des Jeunes
Médiateurs (Moroccan Association of Youth Mediators). As yet
another trainee put it, “Now I have learned to manage my own
emotions. I no longer get overwhelmed with conflicts, and this helps
me act in the right way in case of disagreement.”
Our next major project in Morocco involved the courts. A judicial
system had been established under the French colonial protectorate,
and it had continued to exist after 1956 when the country became
fully independent, But the courts were overwhelmed. According to
the Ministry of Justice, three million new cases were filed annually. It
usually took several years for a case to be decided, and the cost was
beyond the reach of most of the population. The ministry estimated
that about 60 percent of these cases could be resolved more quickly
and economically through mediation, and making mediation widely
available would significantly improve the judicial system. The
arguments for increased use of mediation were not based on
financial considerations alone but also on claims that it offered a
more constructive way of resolving disputes. Success needed to be
judged by the satisfaction of the parties.
In 2003, King Mohammed VI recognized that there were large
problems in the Moroccan judicial system, and he called for
upgrading and transforming it. In response to his royal edict, the
Ministry of Justice signed an agreement with Search to provide
training and advice for bringing mediation into the legal system
(figure 8.1). Mediation was being used effectively in the United
States and Europe to lighten court dockets and to find fair solutions
to disputes. We were determined to institutionalize it in Morocco.

FIGURE 8.1 John Marks signs the mediation agreement with Moroccan Minister of Justice
Mohammed Bouzoubaa as the UK Ambassador Charles Gray looks on.

Our strategy for the judicial system included strategic planning,

capacity-building, and a national consensus process aimed at
bringing all relevant stakeholders on board. Accordingly, we worked
with the Ministry of Justice to sponsor a series of training programs
and forums for five hundred lawyers, magistrates, civil society
leaders, parliamentarians, and private sector representatives. We
also made use of TV and radio talk shows; we published a mediation
guide; we used comic books to reach children and people who could
not read; and we held simulations that were recorded on DVDs.
Almost all the participants in our training programs, which were the
first ever held in Morocco, were enthusiastic about what they
learned. The only negative feedback came from a few attorneys who
feared that introduction of mediation in Morocco would reduce their
billings. As one lawyer put it, “If the mediation process is to
marginalize lawyers, then I am against the reform. The reform should
not have a negative impact on lawyers’ revenues.” We did not share
that view. In the end, the lawyers mostly came on board, and the
Moroccan bar association changed its bylaws to allow lawyers to
serve as mediators.
In 2007, as a direct result of our joint efforts with the Ministry of
Justice, the Moroccan Parliament passed a law that authorized
mediation “as a voluntary, amicable, and confidential, out-of-court
mechanism of dispute settlements.” Needless to say, we were
thrilled with this outcome. According to Mohammed Belmahi, a
lawyer who had learned about mediation through our programs and
who is today president of the Moroccan Mediation Authority, “It is
thanks to Search for Common Ground that this concept has been re-
invented in Morocco. . . . first by popularization of the concept and
then by hundreds of trainings carried out in partnerships.”
As was the case in the Democratic Republic of Congo, our
Morocco program was implemented with little direct input from me in
Washington, D.C. Our staff of Moroccans was calling the shots, and
they were all under the age of thirty. Morocco was—and is—a
country in which youth customarily had little voice; but these
energetic young people believed passionately in what they were
doing, and they had an extraordinary impact.
In 2008, in partnership with the national prison administration and
the king’s foundation for the reintegration of detainees, we began a
new initiative to defuse extremism in Moroccan prisons. Even more
than slums, prisons served as training grounds for violent behavior.
Difficult living conditions, particularly overcrowding, exposed both
inmates and guards to significant risks. In Morocco, as in most
countries, prison staff had limited resources to manage the danger.
Individual conflicts and tensions among detainees and guards
frequently occurred. However, we had an alternative vision about
what could happen in the country’s prisons. We believed that prisons
could be places of growth and rehabilitation. This vision was
informed by South Africa’s Robben Island where Nelson Mandela
and much of the ANC’s leadership had been incarcerated during the
apartheid years. Despite the dreadful conditions there, prisoners had
a profound learning experience. Many called the prison their
“university.”
In Moroccan prisons, our goal was to provide inmates with
constructive approaches for dealing with conflict. We were not
confronting potential terrorists through standard counterterrorism
methods involving punitive or security measures. Rather, we were
taking a long-range approach that focused on shifting the attitudes
and behaviors of the prisoners. We wanted to increase their self-
esteem and, in the process, lower their susceptibility to radical
pressures. In addition to working with inmates, we included prison
guards who were under a great deal of stress and whose attitudes
and behaviors had a substantial impact on prison inmates.
Over the years, our program trained nearly two thousand
inmates, fifty-five prison directors, and more than 150 staff members
in forty-two prisons throughout Morocco. We had the support of the
government and full access to prisoners and staff in more than half
of the country’s prisons. In 2012, we brought into the program two
additional partners, the National Council for Human Rights and the
Rabita Mohammedia des Oulémas.
The Rabita was a progressive network that included 1,300 imams
and researchers who worked out of fifteen research centers across
Morocco. Its mission was “to promote a tolerant and open Islam,”
and it worked from the premise that human rights were an integral
part of the religion. Its head was—and is—Ahmed Abaddi, a
charismatic, brilliant leader who was a close friend of mine and
Susan’s. In 2011, I approached Abaddi with the idea that the Rabita
and Search could cooperate to carry out programs that combined
modern conflict resolution techniques with traditional Islamic
teaching. He agreed, and it was the beginning of a productive
partnership. Before our two organizations began to cooperate, the
Rabita was primarily a scholarly body. We played a key role in
empowering the Rabita to also become an activist NGO involved in
resolving critical problems and preventing violence. As Abaddi put it
in an interview years later, “The dynamic was already there. Search
brought the flame.”
With the Rabita, our role was to find funding, furnish organizing
skills, and help design training courses. The Rabita brought content
and context in deconstructing extremism. Its approach fit well with
Moroccan culture and sensibilities. Abaddi said, “For us, extremism
is a disease.” He was committed to bringing forth “an alternative
discourse” among prisoners—and among the rest of the Moroccan
population as well.
Together, the Rabita and Search developed a curriculum for a
two-day training program for Moslem religious figures. It featured
numerous examples of how the Prophet Mohammad himself used
dispute resolution methodology to prevent violence between warring
tribes. Abaddi concluded, “It was a great collaboration.” We trained a
total of 271 imams, scholars, and mourchidates (female teachers).
They, in turn, passed on their teaching and training in deconstructing
extremism to approximately 22,000 Moroccans.
In 2016, we at Search ended our work in Moroccan prisons.
However, the Rabita not only continued the prison program but also
collaborated with other partners to extend the training to all of the
country’s seventy-eight jails. In addition, the Rabita applied the
methodology it had developed with us to expand its programs to
schools, universities, and the media. It also carried out nationwide
projects to reduce violence against women and, generally, to
enhance the feminine role in Moroccan society. Although Search is
no longer directly involved, our work with the Rabita continues to
resonate to this day.
In conclusion, we at Search can take satisfaction in having
brought modern forms of conflict resolution to Morocco. According to
Mohammed Belmahi, head of the Moroccan Mediation Authority, as
of 2022 more than one thousand professionals were making a living
as mediators and dispute resolvers in the country. When we began,
there had been none. For many years, we were the sole organization
that provided training in mediation and conflict resolution. Today
mediation has become firmly entrenched and institutionalized in the
legal, social, and economic fabric of the country. Mediators are
called upon regularly to help settle conflict in the judicial, business,
and financial sectors. Indeed, mediation has become so mainstream
that the Moroccan Olympic Committee has written mediation into its
charter for dealing with disputes involving athletes; and Royal Air
Maroc, the national airline, uses it to settle complaints from
passengers. Even divorce mediation has come to Morocco.
Our aim from the beginning was to bring a culture of mediation to
Morocco. It would seem that we were successful.

OceanofPDF.com
 9
Develop Effective Metaphors

P
rinciple #9 of social entrepreneurship is “develop effective
metaphors.” The goal is to transmit key messages in a
convincing way. Extended metaphors, usually in the form of
compelling stories, can play a key role in breaking up—and replacing
—deeply held beliefs. To accept new ideas, most people need to be
confident that there is a feasible alternative. Graphic storytelling can
accomplish this and contribute to substantial belief changes.
Metaphors—short or lengthy—provide a picture of what might lie
ahead and why it is desirable.
Social entrepreneurs need to be able to tell their stories in visual,
written, and spoken terms. They should be skilled practitioners of
what advertising executives call content marketing. Above all they
must be able to plausibly and clearly answer this question: “What
would the new reality look like?”
The medium—or combination of media—that works best to
communicate new possibilities would seem to depend on the
mindset of those in the target audience. Some people are most
affected by the written or spoken word. Others are more moved by
what they see or hear.
Music can penetrate consciousness in a profound way, and we
Searchers produced peace songs in many of the places where we
worked. The music video we made in Angola became the theme
song for that country’s constitutional reform process. In Egypt,
national television regularly played our song calling for
understanding between Moslems and Christians whenever there
was a violent incident. American icon Melissa Etheridge and
Pakistani rock star Salman Ahmad made a music video for us that
was shown around the world (figure 9.1).

FIGURE 9.1 Salman Ahmad and Melissa Etheridge sing for peace on Search music video.
Source: Photo by Patty Hoaglund.

I was always on the lookout for convincing metaphors—

particularly those that operated on both the intellectual and the
emotional level. In the early days of Search, I regularly stood up in
living rooms and compared the U.S.-Soviet relationship to two boys
standing knee-deep in a room full of gasoline—each holding a
different number of matches. I said that Search’s aim was not to
change the mix of matches but to find ways to drain the gasoline
from the room. This metaphor illustrated the need for a fundamental
shift in the framework within which the United States and the USSR
confronted each other. For many listeners, it provided an
understanding of how the Cold War could possibly be transformed. I
wanted to communicate that Search could play a part in making this
happen, and I hoped that people in my audience would support our
work.
Whenever possible in these sessions, I used short videos to
supplement the message I wanted to deliver. At the same time, I
recognized that person-to-person encounters of this sort only reach
small groups of people. Similarly, the workshops and trainings
Search sponsored typically involved no more than twenty-five
individuals at a time. Certainly, there could be what Robert Kennedy
called a “ripple” effect, but even that was unlikely to reach a mass
audience.
I had a lofty vision of transformation, but to have an impact at the
global level I clearly needed be able to move beyond workshops,
trainings, and books, which did not reach the millions of people I
wanted to influence. I concluded that, at least for me, the best way to
do this was to make extensive use of mass media—a realization that
predated 1982, the year I founded Search. My defining experience
had come three years earlier while I was writing my second book,
The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” At that time, the Close-
Up division of ABC News asked if I would collaborate in producing a
TV documentary about the CIA’s mind control programs, which were
the subject of my book. ABC agreed that the documentary would be
drawn mainly from material in my manuscript, and the program
would be broadcast at the time of the book’s publication. I very much
liked the idea, if for no other reason than I thought a televised
version of the book would greatly expand readership. In addition, I
had no previous experience in television, and I wanted to learn how
to be a TV producer.
I made an agreement with ABC to be a consultant for the
documentary and gave ABC access to my manuscript prior to
publication. The deal stipulated that whenever ABC made use of
information taken from the book I would either be interviewed on
camera or the narrator would credit the book. In addition, ABC
agreed that I could accompany camera crews on shoots and be
present in the edit suite, so I could gain knowledge in TV production.
However, I did not have what television professionals call final cut. I
was only an observer with a steep learning curve.
When the documentary aired, it was seen by about eight million
viewers. Although ABC was disappointed with that number, I noted
that the audience was about 7,970,000 more people than had read
the book. I recognized that TV could hold a magnifying glass over
my work and make it available to a large number of people. That
lesson remained with me after I founded Search, and it informed my
belief that media could play a key part in defusing conflict. Instead of
being part of the problem—which media programming so often had
been—I believed media could be part of the solution.
However, my strategy did not include writing another book and
having it made into a TV program. Nor did I think I would be
particularly successful in using public relations techniques to bring
attention to my work. I found my answer in an insight famously
expressed by A. J. Liebling, the New Yorker’s longtime press critic.
He said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own
one.” Taking this insight to heart, I decided that, in addition to our
other activities, we Searchers would start our own TV production
department and produce programming that promoted peaceful
conflict resolution.
In 1986, four years after I founded Search, I created a division
inside the organization called Common Ground Productions (CGP).
At the beginning, CGP had no reality, although I had a grand vision
of making broadcast-quality media programming that delivered high-
impact, behavior-changing messages. I imagined that CGP would
provide viewers with what was, in essence, electronic therapy. I
wanted to take advantage of the fact that every culture has a
storytelling tradition. I foresaw CGP making programs that combined
local values with modern media production techniques. The ultimate
goal would be to reach a mass audience with programming that
would promote positive social change.
My first step in bringing this vision to life was to have business
cards printed that said I was the president of Common Ground
Productions. I fully understood that printing shops that make
business cards do not ask for proof or credentials. All they required
was to be paid for the cost of the cards. By making a declaration that
something exists, as I did when I ordered the cards, my vision took
concrete form. These business cards began the progression that
enabled CGP to move from pipe dream to international producer.
Only three years after the first cards came back from the printer,
CGP produced a ten-part series that aired on more than one
hundred U.S. public TV stations. The series was called—of all things
—Search for Common Ground. William Ury, coauthor of Getting to
Yes, helped us develop a format that worked in TV terms and was
consistent with our name and values. The series featured facilitated
discussions between public figures on opposing sides of contentious
issues. Scott Simon of National Public Radio (NPR) was the host,
and I was the on-air moderator.
The series did not overlook the disagreements, but the emphasis
was on finding common ground. Our approach was different from the
traditional journalistic practice of stressing conflict—often for its
entertainment value. The guiding principle in many newsrooms was
(and is) if it bleeds, it leads. In fact, most journalists seem to work
from the premise that conflict is interesting, agreement is boring, and
adversarial interaction draws the largest audience. As a result, media
outlets tend to reward outrageous behavior with airtime and column
inches, and they often ignore actions aimed at building consensus
and solving problems.
Shows full of conflict may create lively conversations and raise
ratings. However, a strong case can be made that programming of
this sort increases polarization and has a negative impact on the
country and the world. Societies almost certainly function better
when differences are resolved and conflict is not exacerbated.
Indeed, if solutions are going to be found to the ever-growing list of
problems that face humanity, common sense would seem to call for
reducing adversarial behavior.
Having once made my living as an investigative reporter who
specialized in pointing out flaws in the system, I was now producing
and moderating a TV series in which guests were asked to look
beyond their differences and discover actual agreements.
 The series had programs on issues such as abortion, euthanasia,
and U.S.-Soviet relations. One particularly lively episode was called
“What’s the Common Ground on Gun Control.” The guests were
Wayne LaPierre, then the chief lobbyist of the National Rifle
Association (NRA) and subsequently its director, and Pete Shields,
who headed Handgun Control and whose son had been killed by
gun violence (figure 9.2). These two men had appeared together
many times. Normally people like them were used by media to
engage in battles of opposing sound bites. They were pros, and an
important part of their job was to present their organization’s views to
the public. To be featured in the media, as they clearly wanted to be,
they needed to be articulate and dynamic. In contrast, as a producer
for the popular news series Nightline once confided to me, if
potential guests were suspected of wanting to find common ground,
they would not be invited to appear on the program.

FIGURE 9.2 On U.S. public TV, John Marks finds common ground between Pete Shields
(left) of Handgun Control and Wayne LaPierre of the NRA.

In the opening segment of our show, Scott Simon narrated an

introduction that framed the core question thusly: “Does gun control
reduce crime, or does gun control only keep guns out of the hands of
law-abiding citizens?” Then he turned over to me what seemed like
the difficult task of finding common ground. To begin, I asked
LaPierre to briefly state his basic position. At this point, the show
deviated from the norm. Instead of having Shields do the same, I
asked him, as he had been forewarned I would, to restate LaPierre’s
position—to LaPierre’s satisfaction. Next, the process was reversed,
with Shields stating his basic position and LaPierre repeating it to
Shields’s satisfaction. This repetition of the other’s position was
important because it required both guests to listen carefully rather
than to be thinking ahead to what they were going to say next. When
people do not listen, there is little chance for them to find common
ground.
Despite being willing to appear together, LaPierre and Shields
showed little respect for each other, and they profoundly disagreed
about how to deal with guns. Nevertheless, it was not our intention to
stage a debate in the usual sense. We were looking for something
else, and we kept score on an electronic scoreboard (figure 9.3).
Each time our guests found a point of agreement, it was noted on
the scoreboard. When they agreed that they disagreed, that was
also recorded on the scoreboard.
FIGURE 9.3 Keeping score on an electronic scoreboard, Search style.

LaPierre’s solution to the problem of gun violence was to build

more prisons and strengthen the punitive measures to be taken
against criminals. Shields, for his part, supported restrictions on what
kind of guns could be sold and who could own them. But their core
disagreement was only the starting point, and the program then
moved on to the next question, which was almost never asked: In
view of your massive disagreements, are there any areas on which
you might agree?
There were some easy agreements. Both men concurred that the
other side was extreme and distorted their position. However, both
said that they did not distort the views of the other side. In addition,
they agreed that automatic weapons, plastic pistols, and cop-killer
ammunition should be banned; that criminals should not have
access to weapons; that there should be instantaneous background
checks before sales; that there should be tough penalties for criminal
use of guns; and that carriers of concealed weapons could be
licensed and made to undergo training in gun safety. Most important,
they said they could jointly support a package that included
instantaneous background checks, more jails, and a tougher criminal
justice system. As Scott Simon put it at the end of the program:

If the two sides in the gun control controversy can join together to design and
support such a program, there may be a better climate to deal with what is the
deeper question: How to prevent so many Americans from shooting each other.

By simply getting the Search for Common Ground series on the

air, CGP took a major leap forward. With this series under our
collective belts, we were well on the way to becoming a credible TV
production company. But we had higher goals. Among other things,
we wanted to create a new model for TV talk shows, and we hoped
our discussion format would be replicated across the United States.
Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, that never happened.
However, we had better luck internationally, and we used the same
format in producing series in Russia, Sri Lanka, and Macedonia.
In 1993 I received an invitation from Hannes Siebert, head of
South Africa’s Media Peace Center, to come to Cape Town to
produce a Search for Common Ground TV series. While apartheid
had gripped South Africa, I had avoided working there. I had not
thought there could be any common ground that included the
apartheid regime, and I had not wanted to be co-opted. Now Nelson
Mandela had been released from prison, and the country was
transitioning to democracy. Given the changed circumstances, I
eagerly accepted Siebert’s invitation and flew off to South Africa for a
trip that would change my life very much for the better.
Within days of arriving in Cape Town, not only did I meet my
future wife, then Susan Collin, but Siebert and I worked out the
details for coproducing a ten-part series to be called South Africa
Searches for Common Ground (figure 9.4). Siebert wanted the
series to be broadcast by NNTV, part of the SABC national network,
and he felt that I, as an American who had produced a similar series,
should pitch the series to the SABC leadership. So Siebert arranged
a lunch for me in Johannesburg with the network’s chief
programming executive. This man proved to be an easy sell, and he
agreed to air the series even before our food was served.
FIGURE 9.4 South Africa Searches for Common Ground—the TV series.

With the deal in hand and the reason for the lunch concluded, it
would have been massively impolite for me to leave before the end
of the meal. I felt a need to make conversation with the SABC man,
a taciturn Afrikaner, but I quickly ran out of small talk. Somewhat
desperate for subjects to discuss, I took a chance and decided to
push him beyond what I thought might be his comfort zone. I asked if
he was familiar with Eyes on the Prize, the award-winning PBS
series on the history of the American civil rights movement. To my
surprise he replied that SABC had previously tried to buy the series,
but its producers had refused to sell it to a TV network that was part
of the apartheid regime. I replied that with the African National
Congress (ANC) no longer banned and apartheid on its way out,
circumstances probably had changed. He threw the ball back to me
and said, if I could arrange it, SABC would certainly be interested in
airing the series.
Selling another producer’s TV series did not seem to be part of
my job description, but I believed Eyes on the Prize could make a
real difference in South Africa. Therefore, when I returned to the
United States, I made a cold call to Henry Hampton, the series’
legendary executive producer. Now that apartheid was ending, I
asked if he would be willing to sell the series to SABC. Under these
new circumstances, he said he would be glad to, so I put him in
touch directly with SABC. Soon, all fourteen episodes of Eyes on the
Prize were aired in South Africa, and I was thrilled to have made the
connection. Hampton even insisted that Search be paid the standard
10 percent agent’s fee for setting up the sale. This was an
unanticipated windfall, and we used the money to produce more
common ground programming. Once again, being engaged led to
unexpected opportunities.
Another unforeseen development was the emergence of radio as
a key part of our media toolbox. When I started CGP, I mistakenly
thought we would only be a TV producer. But I came to see that in
many less-developed countries, particularly those in conflict, radio
was the best way to reach the masses. In much of Africa, TV was, in
fact, a minor or nonexistent player. CGP’s first foray into radio had
been with Studio Ijambo in Burundi in 1995 (see chapter 6). A year
later, I received an unsolicited phone call from the Netherlands. Jan
Pronk, then the Dutch Minister of Development Cooperation, knew
all about Studio Ijambo, and he wanted us to set up a similar facility
in Liberia, which was then coming out of a bloody civil war.
Minister Pronk’s request posed a dilemma for us at Search. As an
organization, one of our basic rules was that we would not let the
availability of money drive our programming. Now the Dutch
government was offering to provide funds that would allow us to start
operations in a new country. My colleagues and I discussed at length
whether to accept the money. We concluded that a radio studio in
Liberia along the lines that Pronk was proposing was conceptually
identical to Studio Ijambo in Burundi, and that the need for such a
studio was at least as great in war-torn Liberia as it had been in
Burundi. As a result, we decided it would be foolish to turn down a
grant that was consistent with our vision just because a funder had
proposed it. So we said thank-you very much, and we accepted the
Dutch money to set up Talking Drum Studio—talking drums having
traditionally been a prime means of communication in Liberia and
throughout West Africa.
Once our Liberian studio was operational, its programs attracted
an audience of 90 percent of the people of Monrovia, the capital city
where half of the population lived. Subsequently we used our base in
Liberia to start full country programs in Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire,
and Guinea. In all those places, we set up radio studios and carried
out a wide range of other peace-building activities.
As our radio production grew, we also increased our television
output in countries where TV played a major role. Our first TV
programs had been facilitated talk shows; although they were
informative, we realized that they were hardly popular entertainment.
We very much wanted to reach an even larger audience, and we
saw would have to produce more engaging programming to do that
—including dramatic series, reality shows, and documentaries.
These other formats were more expensive than talk shows, but
we had built up sufficient credibility as a TV producer that we were
increasingly able to attract funding. For example, our series in South
Africa, which had featured studio-based discussions, led directly in
1997 to USAID support for our most ambitious production yet, a
thirteen-episode documentary series we coproduced with Ubuntu
Films. It was filmed in thirteen different countries and highlighted
traditional and modern ways of resolving conflict across the African
continent. One episode from Mozambique told the story of a former
child soldier who wanted to return to his home village but was not
welcome because he had been a killer. He was allowed back finally
after the local shaman put him through a purification ritual that
involved breaking off the head of a chicken. Another program filmed
in South Africa featured a more up-to-date form of conflict resolution.
It showcased how providing video cameras to gang leaders was able
to defuse ethnic violence.
We made English, French, and Portuguese versions of these
series, which were aired all over Africa. The Cape Argus newspaper
wrote, “The series seeks to shed light on what is working and what is
not, to challenge old stereotypes and assumptions, and to provide
new ways of thinking about conflicts and new tools for dealing with
them.”
When Susan and I moved to Jerusalem in 2002, we formed an
enduring partnership with Palestine’s Ma’an Media Network and its
general director, Ra’ed Othman, a social entrepreneur par
excellence. He started as a tiny broadcaster who pirated much of his
early programming, and he grew to become Palestine’s largest
media producer. Our first encounter with him came during the
second intifada when he agreed to broadcast A Force More
Powerful, an American documentary series on nonviolence. At that
point, he invited Susan and me to come to Ramallah for the initial
meeting of the Palestinian mom-and-pop television stations he was
in the process of bringing into the Ma’an TV network. As we met with
Othman and the station managers, we got a worried call from a
Canadian diplomat who had given us a ride into Ramallah in an
armored SUV. He said Israeli tanks were rolling into the city, and it
wasn’t safe for us to remain. He sent the SUV to collect us
immediately.
We were not deterred by this armed interruption, nor was
Othman. From that beginning, we wound up working with Ma’an to
coproduce scores of dramatic programs, talk shows, and a news
magazine along the lines of 60 Minutes. In addition, we aided Ma’an
in producing a daily news series that continues to this day. We even
coproduced our first-ever reality series titled The President. It was a
thirty-episode series that used an elimination format like American
Idol’s to select a young person to be Palestine’s next president
(figure 9.5). More than 1,200 potential candidates signed up to be
contestants. The winner was selected by viewers who voted with
SMS text messages for the person who had the qualities they hoped
to see in their president. The ratings were extraordinary: one million
Palestinian households—roughly half the population—watched the
series.
FIGURE 9.5 A Palestinian presidential candidate faces the judges on the reality series
titled The President.

In addition to reality programming, we also made a major

expansion into drama, and that attracted large audiences. Our core
premise was that entertaining, nondidactic, dramatic programming
could have a profound impact on how people thought about
themselves, their neighbors, and their society. I was inspired by
shows such as All in the Family, whose lead character was Archie
Bunker. I believed this series and others produced by Norman Lear
had played a major role in shifting mass views on bigotry and racism
in the United States. Repetition seemed to me to be a key reason
these multi-episodic series could have such a pronounced impact.
With a new episode every week, viewers welcomed characters into
their living rooms with whom they could identify and empathize.
Our first TV dramatic series, Nashe Maalo, aired in Macedonia in
1998, and we produced it in partnership with the producers of
Sesame Street (see chapter 5). Three years later we again
collaborated with Sesame, this time in Cyprus where we made an
eight-part series called Gimme 6. This series featured a Greek
Cypriot boy who went to England to attend a summer soccer camp
and met a Turkish Cypriot girl who was going to music school. The
two of them became close friends, and they in turn got involved with
a larger, multicultural group of kids. The series was broadcast on
both the Greek and Turkish sides of Cyprus, as well as in mainland
Greece and Turkey.
Next came a forty-nine-episode dramatic series in Nigeria called
The Station. Making a TV series there presented unexpected
difficulties. We converted a dilapidated Lagos warehouse into a
production studio, and that required the removal of a nest of cobras
from behind what became the soundstage. Less dangerous but still
problematic was the tin roof. When it rained hard, the clattering on
the metal made it impossible to shoot until the weather cleared—
which wasn’t so often during the rainy season.
This Nigerian series told the story of a fictional TV news station in
Lagos—imagine a Nigerian CNN. The boss was a Muslim woman
who wore a modern hijab. Her multiethnic, multireligious staff
reported on the most urgent problems the country faced—through a
prism of tolerance. Their struggle to cooperate was symbolic of the
need for Nigerians from all groups to come together. Beyond social
and political issues, the series also dealt with the drama of daily life,
the stuff of soap opera. Nestlé sponsored the series, and it was
featured at the Clinton Global Initiative. Former President Bill Clinton
called the series “exciting.” He added, “I might like to see one of
these [series] in America.”
Our TV news format was well received in Nigeria, and we thought
it could be popular elsewhere. We got our chance when Mohamed
Gohar, the owner of a television production company in Cairo, heard
about the series and offered to coproduce an Egyptian version. That
seemed like a good idea, particularly because Gohar’s company,
Video Cairo Sat, had the resources and experience to make such a
series. We sent English-language scripts from Lagos to Cairo, and
Egyptian screenwriters linguistically and culturally translated them.
The Station’s reporters became Muslims and Coptic Christians,
instead of Yorubas and Hausas. The result was a thirty-episode,
Arabic-language series that aired on Egyptian national television and
on satellite TV across the entire Middle East.
 In 2006, we developed a new format that enabled us to become a
global producer. It came about when one of our interns came to see
me with a keen insight. At that time, the World Cup in soccer was
only months away from starting in Germany. The intern pointed out
that soccer—or football, as most of the world calls it—almost always
trumps politics, and that the World Cup would be watched by billions
of viewers. He asked, “What are we doing to take advantage of it?” I
replied, “Nothing.” Then, I added, “But we should do something.” And
during the next few minutes, a new format was born.
FIGURE 9.6 The Team, a TV series in eighteen countries featuring a fictional soccer team
reflecting diversity.

I had launched wrestling diplomacy with Iran eight years earlier,

and I had come to see that sport could be a powerful tool for peace
building. In that year of the World Cup, I reasoned why not combine
soccer, the world’s most popular sport, with dramatic television
programming, one of the world’s most popular entertainment forms.
This insight led to a TV series called The Team (figure 9.6). In each
country where we produced this series, the action centered on a
fictional soccer team that reflected the diversity of that country. Of
course, as with most Search programs, there were exceptions. In
Pakistan and Sri Lanka, where soccer was not king, our series
focused on a cricket team.
We had a large vision for the series. But without funding in hand,
we had no choice but to start small. That meant beginning with radio
in a country where we were already working. In 2006 in Côte
d’Ivoire, we produced The Team as a twenty-six-part radio drama. It
focused on two soccer players who came from different regions and
ethnic groups. Like many African stars, they competed professionally
in Europe and played together on the Ivoirian national team. The
BBC described the series as “entertaining and humorous, whilst
communicating a message of reconciliation.”
After The Team aired in Côte d’Ivoire, we felt that the format was
ready for primetime TV, but we still didn’t have the needed funds. We
thought that our best bet for finding the money would be to make a
proposal to the UK’s Department for International Development
(DFID). After all, the Brits seemed to have a fondness for the idea
that multi-episodic soap opera could be used to promote social
change. In 1951, the BBC invented the genre when it produced The
Archers, a daily radio serial that instructed farmers on how to
increase their agricultural output. More than seventy years later, The
Archers is still airing six days a week, and it has expanded to deal
with many other issues.
In view of this history, we asked DFID for $6.1 million to produce
The Team in ten African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries—
without specifying which countries. The funding gods were clearly
aligned with us because DFID said “yes.” For the first time ever, we
had a seven-figure pot of money and flexibility on where we could
spend it.
Moreover, with this grant in hand, I was not content to stop
fundraising for the series. Like most people, I was convinced that
those who have money are more likely to get more money. Thus I
made a declaration to my fellow Searchers: we would use the DFID
grant as leverage to double the funds available for production of The
Team, and we would produce the series in more countries than we
had originally promised. Happily my declaration turned out to be an
underestimation. We wound up more than tripling the DFID grant,
thanks to the generosity of eleven additional funders. Altogether we
produced 356 episodes of The Team in eighteen countries.
In each place where we made the series, we found a local NGO
or production house with sufficient technical skills to be our
coproducer. In addition, we always enrolled a national TV network in
the target country to serve as broadcaster. This was not too difficult
because in most developing countries little drama was actually being
produced. Station managers primarily bought foreign programming—
mostly schlocky U.S. or European fare—for a price considerably
lower than what it would cost to produce original programming in that
country. We devised a business model that almost always resulted in
a yesable proposition that was accepted by prospective
broadcasters. We offered them a high-quality, locally produced
dramatic series at no cost. In a few places, we even paid for airtime.
In return, the broadcaster agreed to publicize the series and show it
in prime time.
Each production of The Team needed to reflect the culture of the
country in which it was being made. This could not be accomplished
with scripts written in faraway places, so we employed local writers.
At the same time, we wanted to make sure the plots reflected our
common ground perspective. We understood that compelling drama
called for conflict between characters, but our shows did not allow
violence to prevail. In the end, we wanted the good guys to win.
To make sure programs met our standards, we usually sent in
Deborah Jones, who was then executive producer of Common
Ground Productions. Jones was masterful in bringing out the best in
local scriptwriters, and she guided them through a two-week
workshop during which general storylines were developed.
Afterward, she read and edited draft scripts until final versions were
ready. In each country where she worked, she combined TV
production skills with a deep knowledge of our common-ground
approach. Before coming to Search, she had worked in Hollywood
where she had created a TV series called Amazing Grace starring
Patty Duke. In addition, she had written several television films.
Despite Jones’s successes in La La Land, she had come to feel
that there was more to life than making made-for-TV movies, and
she had enrolled in a master’s program at Tufts University’s Fletcher
School to learn about conflict resolution. She was first recommended
to us for a job as a summer intern. I initially met her on a trip to
Boston, and she was the only prospective intern I ever encountered
who arrived at her job interview in a Mercedes.
The first place we produced a televised version of The Team was
in Kenya where we had an excellent local partner, Media Focus on
Africa. Our broadcaster was Citizen-TV, the country’s most watched
television network. The series lasted for three seasons and
consisted of thirty-nine half-hour shows that consistently ranked in
the top-ten of Kenyan TV programs. We also made radio versions of
the series that were broadcast in tribal languages.
Like most countries in Africa, Kenya had a gender problem.
Jones and the local writers came up with a plot premise in which a
Kenyan team was invited to a seven-a-side soccer tournament that
featured young women and men playing together as equals (figure
9.7). To top it off, the Kenyans had a woman coach, and the males
on the team had to overcome their resistance to playing for her.
Beyond gender issues, the series focused on the conflicts between
the country’s many ethnic groups, and team members all came from
different tribes. The core metaphor of the series—in Kenya and
everywhere—was that players who did not cooperate and overcome
their ethnic and religious differences would not score goals, and they
would lose. As former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan described
The Team during the period when he served as a mediator to
prevent violence in Kenya, “This timely, topical project is a very
positive step forward in helping Kenyans to overcome obstacles
such as ethnicity, which stand in the way of progress for the country.”

FIGURE 9.7 The Team cast in Kenya.

Everywhere we produced The Team, we homed in on local

problems (figures 9.8 and 9.9). In the Democratic Republic of Congo,
players were 100 percent women, and the series was part of our
nationwide campaign to prevent sexual violence. In Côte d’Ivoire, the
series explored divisions between Muslims and Christians. In
Morocco, the gulf was between rich and poor. In Indonesia, the
action was set inside a prison where convicts from two ethnic groups
were fighting each other until a new warden—a woman—started a
soccer team.
FIGURE 9.8 The Team cast in Indonesia.

FIGURE 9.9 The Team cast in Sri Lanka.

 In 2013, I had an appointment at the USAID office in Cairo where
I planned to pitch a Middle Eastern regional version of The Team. My
interlocutor, a veteran USAID man, quickly told me he wasn’t
interested in a soccer-based series. He did ask, however, if I had
anything in my bag of tricks that involved the empowerment of
women. On the spot, I invented a new format. I told him that we
could make a dramatic series called Madam President. I said that
the series would be set in a fictional Arab country and would
resemble the American TV show The West Wing—except that the
president would be a woman. Unlike most of the male rulers in the
region, she would be a problem-solver. She would eschew violence
and would not base her policies on saving face or seeking revenge.
The USAID man clearly had an urgent bureaucratic need for
women’s programming. Unknowingly I had ventured into his office at
a crucial moment—presumably when he had money left in his
budget that needed to be spent before the end of the fiscal year. He
asked me to move quickly and to send him a concept note and a
budget for the series I had just described. I did so, and USAID came
through with a substantial grant.
Jones and I decided to base production of Madam President in
Jordan, and the result was fifteen hours of dramatic programming
that was broadcast across the entire Middle East by satellite TV.
Subsequently we used a similar format in Nepal to produce a series
called Madame Prime Minister.
Despite producing all of these TV series, Common Ground
Productions had never made a feature film. That opportunity came in
Jerusalem in 2013 when the European Union provided us with
funding for an Israeli-Palestinian coproduction called Under the
Same Sun. This was a fictional docudrama set in the near future. It
told the story of two business partners: a Palestinian and an Israeli
who formed a joint solar energy company. Because of objections in
in each society to normalizing relations with the other side, they both
faced profound hostility. They came to recognize that their business
would have little chance of success if the conflict continued. Their
solution was to mount a Facebook campaign that created a
groundswell of support for a negotiated settlement. They had set out
to make money, and they wound up making peace. The film—
obviously a fable—aired on both Israel’s Channel 2 and the
Palestinian Ma’an Network, and it was shown repeatedly on
American TV by Participant Media’s Pivot Network.
By the time I stepped down as president of Search in 2014,
media projects consumed about half of our budget. We pioneered
the use of television and radio programming to promote social
change, and our extensive use of media distinguished our work from
other organizations in the peace-building field. As the Christian
Science Monitor put it, “Search for Common Ground knows first-
hand the subtle, healing power of storytelling.”

OceanofPDF.com
 10
Display Chutzpah

S
ocial entrepreneurship is definitely not a good career choice
for those who are timid. Launching new initiatives and
overcoming seemingly insoluble problems often requires
chutzpah (a Yiddish word meaning extreme self-confidence—or
nerve or gall). When bold solutions are called for, social
entrepreneurs need to exhibit sufficient chutzpah to take risks that
facilitate pushing into unknown territory. Principle #10 of social
entrepreneurship is “display chutzpah.”
Nevertheless, chutzpah should not be seen as a boundless
quality that social entrepreneurs regularly unleash. It should be a
calculated response—and not one that is triggered by anger. It
needs to be tempered with discretion and wisdom. In my view, both
good and bad chutzpah exist. The most familiar example of bad
chutzpah was described by author Leo Rosten: “Chutzpah is that
quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father,
throws himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan.” In contrast,
good chutzpah is what Abraham, the Biblical prophet, demonstrated
when he had the effrontery to oppose God’s plan to destroy Sodom
and Gomorrah. By standing up to God, Abraham had the nerve to
take a grave risk to save lives—even if the people spared were evil
and corrupt.
Social entrepreneurs should avoid displaying bad chutzpah. No
matter how worthy the cause, the ends do not justify the means.
Needless to say, it is almost never OK to be rude or obnoxious in the
name of making the world a better place. However, sometimes social
entrepreneurs should dial up their inner chutzpah and act in a
politely pushy manner. For example, I have found that bureaucrats,
particularly those in government offices, tend to be overloaded with
paperwork and meetings. When a social entrepreneur has submitted
a proposal and has not received a response, it can be helpful, after a
decent interval, to be insistent in seeking an answer. This tactic can
sometimes move the proposal from the bottom of an inbox to the top.
At other times, if the person being targeted feels unduly pressured,
there can be an adverse reaction. In such a situation, I have found
the best way to proceed is to be understanding and mildly
apologetic. Rather than directly confronting a slow-moving official, I
might communicate something like this: “Please excuse my
pushiness. I know that you are very busy, but I would much
appreciate it if you could let me know when you will be able to
provide me with an answer.”
In substantive matters, social entrepreneurs should be prepared
to be daring and to take risks. The trick is to find the right balance
between risk-taking and throwing caution to the wind. But even when
social entrepreneurs take preventive measures that reduce the
chances of failure, they should understand that a high percentage of
their prospective undertakings are not going to be successful. I
estimate that no more than one-third of the initiatives I proposed over
the years were ever realized. A baseball player who hits .333 is a
superstar, but this batting average also involves a large number of
strikeouts. Social entrepreneurs, like superstars, must not allow
themselves to be crippled by missed swings, which are very much
part of the game. They need to be able to deal with failure, if for no
other reason than because they have no other choice.
Founding Search for Common Ground was, on my part, an act of
chutzpah. Like most social entrepreneurs in the start-up phase, I was
putting my future on the line. I didn’t have a Plan B. Search reflected
my vision, but there was almost no evidence that the work I
contemplated was feasible or even a good idea. In those pre-Google
days, I consulted by phone and in person with knowledgeable people
about what I wanted to do and what might be possible. I was able to
borrow ideas from other groups, such as the Esalen Institute’s
Soviet-American initiative and Harvard’s Project on Negotiation, but
as far as I knew, no organization like Search had ever existed. In the
end, I simply had to take a chance and dive in. Doing so turned out
to be the best professional decision I ever made. I discovered my
life’s work.
The going was not easy in the early years before Search had
much of a track record. We were carrying out only a few projects,
and if one had failed, there would have been little else on which to
fall back. I shudder to remember how I would sit in a workshop and
worry that things were not going well. I feared that the meeting would
crash and take the organization with it. However, I usually was able
to shake this feeling by invoking a reassuring mantra: trust the
process.
In those first days, Search was in a precarious position partly
because of the difficulty my colleagues and I had in raising enough
money to keep our doors open. We needed to pay for both
operations and salaries. We realized that there was a fundamental
contradiction in our early fund-raising strategy. All our funding came
from the United States, but our approach seemed more compatible
with the values of countries in northern Europe. We recognized that
we needed to find ways to reach possible donors in the UK, the
Netherlands, Belgium, and Scandinavia. Therefore, in 1994, shortly
after I married Susan, she and I decided to travel together to Europe
in search of funds. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, “Europe seemed to
be the place where the money was.”
Our strategy combined chutzpah with romance. As newlyweds,
the idea of a trip together to Europe was exciting. But for purposes of
fund-raising, we were heading into unexplored terrain, and we chose
to proceed in a way that broke new ground. In keeping with the idea
that 80 percent of success is showing up, we understood that we
needed to meet in person with potential funders. We did our
homework before we left Washington, D.C., and we put together a
full schedule of appointments with the help of referrals from
European friends and colleagues.
Because Search was a cash-starved organization, keeping costs
down was a high priority. At the same time, for both Susan and me,
taking long train rides together was a definite turn on. We flew to
Europe and then traveled from city to city with Eurail passes, which
gave us unlimited use of trains for the week we were on the ground.
We also avoided the expense of hotels by booking compartments in
sleeping cars. Using this somewhat unconventional mode of travel,
we were able to hit five cities in five days: Oslo, Stockholm,
Copenhagen, The Hague, and Brussels. In the process, we learned
a great deal about the needs and priorities of potential donors.
Indeed, our trip turned into a crash course in how to make yesable
propositions to European funding agencies. To paraphrase
Napoleon, we became engaged, and then we saw new possibilities
—in this case, for future funding.
Probably the most important information we acquired was that
the European Union (EU), the continent’s largest donor, had an
unwritten policy of rarely making grants to American NGOs. On
learning this, we devised a relatively simple work-around. We
reconfigured ourselves as Europeans, and we registered in Belgium
as a nonprofit organization (association sans but lucrative) called the
European Centre for Common Ground. Still needing to save money,
we secured free office space and legal assistance from Hunton &
Williams, a U.S. law firm with a Brussels office. Although we
continued to be an American NGO headquartered in Washington,
D.C., we legally became two organizations with a combined
management structure.
Subsequently, most people we met in the EU understood that we
were based in the United States, and we didn’t try to conceal it.
Nevertheless, we apparently were viewed to be sufficiently European
to receive substantial EU support. In this and other ways, our
chutzpah-laden, Eurail fund-raising strategy clearly paid off. The EU
became our largest single donor, and we received grants from the
national governments of all five countries to which Susan and I
traveled by train.
It was not only in fund-raising that we exhibited chutzpah. In
developing new projects, we regularly pushed into areas where
others had never before ventured. Sometimes that took a certain
degree of nerve. Although we were often told that the time wasn’t
right for what we were proposing, we usually persisted. I realized
that many people believe that the time is never right for adventurous
new ideas. For example, in 1988 I had been sternly warned by a
high State Department official not to take American participants to
Moscow for a meeting of the U.S.-Soviet Task Force to Prevent
Terrorism. The official who advised me to cease and desist held the
rank of ambassador. As a former junior diplomat, I admit that I was
somewhat intimidated by people who had reached such a high
position in the State Department. In addition, as a common grounder,
I was reluctant to get into a direct dispute with my own government.
Rather than opposing official policy, I wanted to complement and
enhance it. Also, I did not like the idea that I might be accused of
being a useful idiot whom the Soviets were exploiting for propaganda
purposes—which this ambassador was implying I was. Although
those concerns were real, I went ahead anyway because both my
gut and my mind told me that in those heady days of Gorbachev’s
reforms our initiative to promote cooperation against terrorism was
timely and important. I had sufficient chutzpah to plow ahead.
Going against the warning from the ambassador was a calculated
risk on my part. However, taking risks should not be confused with
being foolhardy. As a social entrepreneur, I always tried to aim high
—to shoot for the moon. But at the same time, I recognized that
misfires were inevitable, and I came to see that aikido-type, small
steps usually worked better than grand, unified solutions. In addition,
whenever I was launching a risky project, I knew I could lessen the
danger by taking preventive measures. For example, with the U.S.-
Soviet Task Force to Prevent Terrorism, I assumed that opposition to
our initiative was likely to come from the conservative side of the
U.S. political spectrum, so I leaned to the right in selecting American
participants. I also kept U.S. government officials informed about
what I was doing, which became easier when the ambassador who
had opposed the project was transferred to another post. Although I
had nothing to do with his reassignment, it certainly was a stroke of
good fortune. As a social entrepreneur, I did not underestimate the
importance of being lucky.
Similarly, when we at Search were putting together our U.S.-Iran
project, we were advised by another American ambassador—this
one retired—that such a project might anger the administration and
jeopardize future funding. Once again, we chose several
conservative participants, and we made sure to keep government
officials informed. We even persuaded the president of the United
States to send a supportive message to participants at the first
meeting. When we hit an obstacle with our policy proposals, we did
not try to overwhelm the opposition, either in Washington, D.C. or in
Tehran. In neither place would that have been an effective strategy.
Rather, like the wind-up toy truck whose path is blocked by a piece
of furniture, we backed off and found a way around. In the process,
we invented wrestling diplomacy and made progress in ways that we
had not anticipated when we began the project.
Despite our precautions, our U.S.-Iran project came up against
an unforeseen obstacle—as the Dunbar Factor predicted it was likely
to do. One of our Iranian colleagues, a distinguished Tehran
University professor with whom we had been working closely for
fourteen years, was stopped by customs officials as he entered the
United States at Washington’s Dulles Airport. Although he had a valid
entry visa, he was led to a small room where FBI agents were
waiting for hm. This was clearly not a spontaneous event where an
alert customs agent had recognized that there might be a problem
with his entry documents. The FBI men said that they wanted him to
become their agent and to report on the activities of prominent
Iranian-Americans. They threatened him, stating that he would be
indicted as an unregistered agent of the Iranian government if he
failed to cooperate. However, if he agreed to work undercover, they
said no charges would be filed against him, and he would not be
deported from the United States. Faced with this unpalatable choice
and unfamiliar with his rights under the American legal sysem, the
professor came to us for help. We were clear that the charges were
trumped up and that he was being prosecuted—and persecuted—
because he had not agreed to spy for the FBI.
My colleagues and I were told by our lawyers that we, too, might
be at risk if we assisted the professor. Our fears mounted when we
were served with a federal subpoena—the only one we ever
received in the history of the organization. We were required to turn
over all of our records pertaining to the professor. Our lawyers told
us that if federal officials could accuse our Iranian colleague of a
crime, they might also claim that we were guilty of doing much the
same thing—which we were in the sense that we had been
collaborating with the professor to improve bilateral relations with
Iran. Therefore, we could also be charged. We recognized that we
had a legal obligation to comply with the subpoena, so we provided
the government with copies of all of our documents that mentioned
the professor, including reports of meetings and his travel records.
Although we felt that there was nothing in the documents that
damaged his case, we certainly did not like the idea of providing the
government with accounts of our meetings and internal
communications. In addition, our lawyers warned us that we might
further incur the wrath of the FBI and the Justice Department if we
persisted in helping the professor.
There was definitely chutzpah in our response. We were not
about to leave a close colleague twisting slowly in the wind—
particularly someone who we believed was innocent. The professor
had risked both his career in Iran and reprisals from his own
government to work with us. Our response was to find the professor
pro bono legal representation and to provide him with a steady
stream of advice—albeit not in direct meetings but through his
lawyers and ours. By communicating through lawyers, we
understood that our discussions were protected under attorney-client
privilege. We considered taking the story of the FBI’s heavy-handed
approach to the media, but we decided not to do so because we
didn’t know whether publicity would help or hurt the case. In the end,
our senior advisor, Ambassador (ret.) Bill Miller, accompanied by the
professor’s lawyer, had a long meeting with the U.S. attorney who
was orchestrating the prosecution. Miller described in great detail the
nature of what our Iranian colleague had been doing, and he
explained that the professor’s actions mirrored ours in seeking to
improve the U.S.-Iran relationship. Because we weren’t sure if the
U.S. attorney understood the FBI’s motivation, Miller also described
what we regarded to be the coercive tactics the FBI had used to try
to recruit the professor. For whatever reason, soon after this meeting
the government dropped its main charge against the professor.
Our efforts to support the professor lasted more than two years.
However, the time to make a decision about whether or not to aid
him—which was our moment of truth—came after we first learned
about the government’s threat to prosecute him. As time progressed,
the need for bold action—involving chutzpah—receded as our
involvement became more routine and our initial fear of reprisal from
the government lessened. With this case—and with most others—
chutzpah was not a quality that was required to be displayed on a
continuing basis.
The need for chutzpah can occur both at the beginning of a
project and during the implementation stage, but it is usually called
for only during a short period of time when a decision must be made,
or when a corrective action is called for. After that point, the danger
is likely either to become acute or to fade away.

OceanofPDF.com
 11
Cultivate Fingerspitzengefühl

R
eader beware! The principles of social entrepreneurship, as
described in this book, are not cast in stone. They do not
reflect received wisdom. They should be regarded as useful
but not immutable. Although the list remained essentially the same
throughout my entire career, on occasion I made additions and
subtractions.
Perhaps the most notable add-on came after I gave a
presentation to a group of European Searchers on what was then
the list of principles. At the end, a Dutch colleague commented, “You
left something out.” I said that was entirely possible, and I asked her
what was missing. She answered, “Fingerspitzengefühl.” She
explained that this is a German word that literally means feeling
through your fingertips. When people possess it, she said, they have
an intuitive sense about a given situation and a spontaneous
appreciation of how best to react. At the heart of fingerspitzengefühl
is the innate ability to know without thinking.
Once I understood what the word meant, I realized that she was
absolutely right. Fingerspitzengefühl was—and is—a crucial but
immeasurable component of social entrepreneurship. Having a
feeling for what should happen is a quality that can be extremely
helpful. Novices starting out usually cannot successfully employ
fingerspitzengefühl; social entrepreneurs enhance their ability to
sense possibilities through extensive experience and deep
immersion in their core activity. This is what one-time basketball star
and later U.S. Senator Bill Bradley was referring to—albeit in a
sporting context—when he said:

When you have played basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket.
. . . You develop a sense of where you are.

After being introduced to the concept of fingerspitzengefühl, I saw

I had long been making use of it without realizing that the word even
existed. This was another example of the phenomenon that Molière
had in mind when he wrote, “For more than forty years, I have been
speaking prose without knowing it.”
When I compiled my first list of principles for social
entrepreneurship, fingerspitzengefühl should have been included.
However, I didn’t know that I didn’t know about it. Principle #11 of
social entrepreneurship is “cultivate fingerspitzengefühl.” The next
time I made a presentation on social entrepreneurship, I added this
principle to my list.
However, I recognized that social entrepreneurs need to exercise
caution in applying fingerspitzengefühl. It is not a principle that
should consistently be used to override a well-thought-out approach.
Just as there is danger in social entrepreneurs—or anyone else—
thinking they are the smartest people in the room, there is similar
peril in making decisions based solely on instinct. Neither rational
thinking nor intuitive impulses should be allowed to serve as the sole
determinant in decision-making. Good decisions usually contain both
empirical evidence and a positive answer to this question: Does it
feel right?
In other words, social entrepreneurs should cultivate the ability to
judiciously combine their intellect with their gut. I seemed to have
accomplished this when, somewhat improbably, I brought the CIA
and the KGB together to cooperate in preventing terrorism and also
when I took American wrestlers to Iran. On other occasions I didn’t
listen to my instincts, and I sometimes made poor choices, which is
what happened when I was approached in the year 2000 about
setting up a Track 2 process between Americans and Libyans.
Intuitively, this seemed like a great idea, but there were several
logical reasons not to do it. One big one was that Muammar Qaddafi,
then Libya’s unquestioned ruler, appeared to have little inclination to
change. In addition, I doubted that Search had the capacity to
engage simultaneously with Iran and Libya, two countries widely
considered to be outlaw states. I was very busy when the Libyan
opportunity arose, and feeling overloaded certainly limited my
openness to starting a new project. Nevertheless, if I had listened to
my fingerspitzengefühl, I would have acted differently, but I allowed
my rational mind to prevail.
With the benefit of hindsight, I believe I probably made the wrong
decision, and as a consequence, we at Search missed a great
opportunity. Unknown to us, Qaddafi would soon be looking to settle
—or at least reduce—his differences with the United States. If my
colleagues and I had launched a Track 2 Libyan-American initiative, I
am reasonably sure that our efforts would have accentuated the
change Qaddafi was on the brink of pursuing. This would have been
yet another instance of riding a horse in the direction it was soon to
be going. We would not have been trying to overcome historical
trends, which is what we had been doing in our efforts to improve
relations between Iran and the United States. With Libya, we would
have been ahead of the curve, exactly where social entrepreneurs
should position themselves.
In another instance, I followed my gut despite the fact that my
rational self told me that getting involved would probably be the
equivalent of hitting my head against a brick wall. The question at
hand was abortion—inside the United States. This was a seemingly
insoluble matter, and in the opinion of most people who supported
us, it was not susceptible to the common ground approach. As
mediation expert Michelle LeBaron has written:

Even experienced conflict resolvers shrug their shoulders when the topic is raised,
arguing that issues like abortion do not lend themselves to consensus building.
After all, abortion is not a conflict in which proponents on either side are likely to
change their views. The individuals involved are acting from deeply-held beliefs,
values, conscience, and the sense that their views are, in fact, constitutionally
protected rights.
 In the early 1990s, then as now, the argument over abortion was
harsh and polarized across the United States. Partisans on both
sides confronted each other and consumed vast amounts of energy
and resources. At the same time, other related problems—such as
preventing unwanted pregnancies and improving maternal health—
also required urgent attention. Unfortunately, the acrimonious battles
around abortion greatly limited the country’s ability to take
constructive actions. The leaders of the two sides of the abortion
debate were so angry with each other that they couldn’t cooperate
even in places where they agreed.
My impulse was to launch a project that brought together the pro-
life and pro-choice camps to promote cooperation on issues related
to abortion where there might be agreement. I felt this approach
might work, even though there was virtually no evidence that it would
—or should—be successful. Given the passion surrounding the
abortion issue—plus the fact we at Search had virtually no
experience working on hot-button, domestic matters—this was
uncharted and possibly dangerous territory for us. Most of our
supporters agreed that people in faraway places—such as Hutus
and Tutsis or Israelis and Palestinians—should find common ground,
but there was little agreement among Americans on either the right
or the left that any accord could be found around abortion. On the
level of rational analysis, the facts seemed to call for Search not
getting involved. However, with the benefit of fingerspitzengefühl, my
gut told me we should give it a try and launch a project.
Our involvement started in 1989 when we produced a TV
program on abortion as part of our Search for Common Ground
series that aired on U.S. public television. The guests were Kate
Michelman, head of the National Abortion Rights Action League
(NARAL), and John Willke, president of the National Right to Life
Committee. Seeking common ground on abortion had enough of a
man-bites-dog quality that the show attracted considerable attention.
Willke and Michelman profoundly disagreed with each other on
the core question of abortion—yes or no. But using our format, which
was based on the premise that their disagreement was only the
starting point, the program moved on to a question rarely asked:
Despite your massive differences, are there any related areas on
which the pro-choice and pro-life camps might agree?
Michelman and Willke identified many such points. They agreed
that both sides wanted to reduce the number of abortions (Willke
wanted to take the number down to zero, whereas Michelman
believed the option should be available as a matter of personal
choice). They also were in agreement that unwanted pregnancies
should be minimized; that promoting birth control was a point of
common ground between many on both sides of the abortion issue
(but not for these two); and that they could work together on efforts
to promote adoption and reduce infant mortality. In addition, they
both said that violence was never justified in support of their cause.
After watching a preview of our show, Christopher Lydon, WGBH-
TV’s lead anchor in Boston, narrated a segment describing it on his
evening news broadcast. He referred to the involvement of
Michelman and Willke thusly:

By the end of the conversation, their body language and voice tones had all
softened and the disarmed warriors were actually rushing to rack up points of
agreement. . . . It looked almost if you had given them a pill.

Rest assured that we used no behavior-changing drugs. However,

by asking different questions, different answers emerged.
From my perspective, our TV program proved that even bitter
foes could find areas of agreement—not on the core question of
whether abortion should be legal but on related matters, such as
promoting adoption, minimizing the number of abortions in the
United States, and ending violence around clinics. Furthermore, I
believed that there was a substantial opening for a Search project to
make these things happen because I felt that a large number of
Americans did not hold absolute positions on abortion, and that the
policies of organized groups on both sides often did not reflect
popular opinion. I sensed that the country was ready for fresh
approaches, and I thought some of the discordant energy around the
abortion issue could be channeled in positive directions. I was not
suggesting that the basic disagreement could be resolved or even
bridged, but I felt that pro-choicers and pro-lifers could work together
in ways that would produce both more choice and more life.
Moreover, if organizations on both sides cooperated to find ways
to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, I believed there
would be much less demand for abortions and that many fewer
would take place. That, in turn, would probably lead to a reduction in
polarizing rhetoric, and much of the poison would be drained from
the national debate. If this were to happen, I recognized that there
would almost certainly be opposition from groups on both sides of
the issue—if for no other reason than a less poisonous atmosphere
would probably lessen the urgency of both the pro-choice and pro-
life causes and make it more difficult to raise funds. Above all, I had
a strong sense that we at Search should go ahead.
The specific opportunity to do so emerged in 1992 as a direct, but
unforeseen, result of our TV series. After the episode on abortion
aired, we made the videotape widely available, and it was viewed by
the leadership of the Buffalo, New York Council of Churches at a
time of turmoil in that city over abortion. Operation Rescue, a militant
pro-life group, had launched a highly controversial campaign to
physically block access to local abortion clinics. In response, pro-
choice activists had assembled on the streets to confront their foes
and to keep the clinics open. The police wound up arresting 517 of
the Operation Rescue supporters and eighteen of the pro-choice
opposition. The Council of Churches, which included denominations
with beliefs on both sides of the abortion issue, took it upon itself to
try to defuse the conflict. At a certain point, the Council’s director, the
Reverend Stanford Bratton, sent me a letter in which he requested
Search’s assistance in reducing divisiveness. He wrote:

It is our hope that you will help us move beyond our present situation toward the
search for common ground and work on common issues identified in the process.
We have used your videotape many times, and it has helped stimulate interest
and hope here in Buffalo.

On receiving this letter, I moved quickly and flew from Moscow to

Buffalo. Once there and on subsequent trips I worked with the
Council of Churches to put together the Buffalo Coalition for
Common Ground. It was governed by a fifteen-member Steering
Committee balanced between pro-life and pro-choice partisans. Its
mission statement declared it was committed to addressing the deep
divisions that existed in the Buffalo area and the nation as a whole.
As the Chicago Tribune later wrote about the Steering Committee’s
meetings:

Discussions are respectful, but thorny. Moreover, participants often face hostility
from members of their own movements who accuse them of negotiating with the
enemy.

By virtue of establishing itself and agreeing to joint action, the

Buffalo Coalition was modeling the very behavior that it aimed to
establish in the larger community. The goal was to reframe the
conflict in ways with which both pro-life and pro-choice participants
could feel comfortable. Fundamental to the coalition and to our
abortion-connected work elsewhere was the idea that no one was
ever asked to change her or his belief about whether abortion should
or should not be legal. Participants needed only to be willing to seek
ways they could work together with people who held opposing views.
Around the same time that we started to work in Buffalo, local
common ground groups spontaneously sprang up in St. Louis, San
Francisco, Milwaukee, and ten other cities. Emergence of these
groups by no means represented a popular groundswell, but it was
at least a budding trend. It showed that there might be an authentic
base for a national organizing effort. As a result, we at Search
contacted all the local groups we could identify and invited them to
come to Washington, D.C. for a series of meetings. Under our
auspices, their leaders agreed to form the Common Ground Network
for Life and Choice. The network took on the mission of reducing
polarization by encouraging dialogue and by helping to organize
action-oriented projects.
During this period, we were able to raise a modest amount of
money, and we hired two staff members, Adrienne Kaufmann and
Mary Jacksteit, to lead the project. Kaufmann was a Catholic nun
from the Benedictine order, and Jacksteit was a liberal attorney and
mediator. They both had received master’s degrees in conflict
resolution. Because we probably could not have found a single staff
member who would have been considered neutral on the question of
abortion, the combination of these two seemed to represent a perfect
pairing. Neither ever spoke of her personal stance, and both
maintained impartiality. Although all of us who were connected to the
project had our private views about abortion, our organization was
never accused of favoring one side or the other.
Kaufmann’s and Jacksteit’s job was to furnish local groups with
organizing assistance, program design, expertise on facilitation,
training, and a quarterly newsletter. They carried out a series of
meetings and dialogue sessions around the country, including three
workshops for pro-choice and pro-life partisans in Buffalo. At first,
participants were mainly interested in talking calmly with one another
and exchanging personal stories. Most participants came to
recognize that people on the other side were thoughtful individuals
who usually had gone through painful experiences. In essence,
these dialogue sessions allowed participants to rediscover their
shared humanity. As Harper’s Magazine reported, “The
conversations were a positive, even transforming experience.”
Many of the local groups moved on to implement joint projects. In
some cities, pro-life and pro-choice members made appeals and
appearances to reduce tensions and prevent violence. We held two
national conferences that brought together the two sides.
Commented one attendee:

I have never listened so hard, been listened to so intently, never laughed and
cried so hard. It reaffirms my commitment to love my opponent, something which
can be lost in the heat of my activism.

We also commissioned and published a series of jointly written

papers, including one coauthored by Karen Swallow Prior, a one-
time Operation Rescue activist from Buffalo, and Marilyn Cohen,
executive director of a women’s health center in Iowa City that
performed abortions. Both of these women were board members of
our Network for Life and Choice, and they collaborated in writing a
paper on setting standards for activism around abortion clinics. They
affirmed support for nonviolence, free speech, and respect for
women as moral decision-makers. They agreed that activists outside
clinics should not use tactics that caused fear or intimidation; that
women considering abortion should receive accurate, thorough, and
objective information; and that pro-lifers and pro-choicers should be
able to agree on information on fetal development and other
scientific aspects of abortion.
We believed that the Network for Life and Choice was making
real progress in defusing contentiousness and in giving Americans
alternative ways to think about abortion. However, our efforts were
regularly attacked from both the right and the left sides of the political
spectrum. Interestingly, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Buffalo and a
prominent liberal activist writing on the New York Times op-ed page
used nearly identical language in declaring that common ground
simply was not possible around abortion. Unfortunately, from our
perspective, American foundations and donors proved unwilling to
provide financial support to sustain the overall project. Potential
funders turned out to be just as polarized as the activists who
confronted each other in the streets, and they were not interested in
supporting our consensus-building approach. Consequently, we
were not able to raise enough money to keep the project going, and
we were forced to close it in 1999 after six years of activity.
I still feel that the Network for Life and Choice was a much-
needed initiative, and I have no regrets about having tried to build it
into a national movement. If the ideas that underlaid it had taken
hold, it would have made a huge impact. Obviously, we were trying
to buck the rising tide of polarization. Unfortunately, to put it in
figurative terms, we were riding a horse in the opposite direction
from where it was going. My original feeling that we could make a
success out of the Network for Life and Choice proved to be wrong.
Such is the problem with overreliance on fingerspitzengefühl.
Sometimes it opens up the possibility that a social entrepreneur will
move into a brave new world, and sometimes it does not.

OceanofPDF.com
 12
Bringing It All Together

I
n the first eleven chapters, I have listed the principles of social
entrepreneurship in a numerical progression—beginning with
Principle #1 and moving numerically through to Principle #11.
This is a logical way to present the principles, but in real life they are
virtually never employed in such a neat sequence. Although Principle
#1 (start from vision) and Principle #2 (be an applied visionary) are
almost always put to use at the beginning of a venture, after that
principles are used as needed and are not employed in any
particular order. Some principles may be used repeatedly, and others
simply may not be needed; but it is not unusual for all eleven
principles to be part of a single initiative. This is exactly what
happened in the following example, a project Search launched to
improve relations between the United States and Syria.
Search’s involvement began in 2006, three years before the Arab
Spring led to civil war in Syria. At that time, a well-known Israeli
journalist invited me and John Bell, a former Canadian diplomat who
then headed Search’s Middle East program, to lunch at the American
Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. The journalist reminded us that the
fifteenth anniversary of the Madrid Peace Conference was
approaching, and he proposed we commemorate that event by
cosponsoring with the Toledo International Center for Peace, a
Spanish NGO, a conference to be called “Madrid 15 Years Later”.
The original Madrid conference had taken place in 1991, thanks
to the leadership of U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. For the
first time ever, Israeli government officials, semiofficial Palestinians,
and representatives of numerous Arab and Western governments
came together in one official gathering. This landmark event had
marked the beginning of unprecedented Middle East regional peace
negotiations. As a direct result, four bilateral working groups
involving Israel and its neighbors had been created, along with five
multilateral groups that had dealt with issues including water,
environment, arms control, refugees, and economic development.
Although no final agreements were reached and the process had
petered out after a few years, these negotiations in Madrid had gone
further toward resolving regional conflict than any previous effort.
Fifteen years later, the prospects for peace in the region had
regressed. The Israeli journalist’s vision, which we Searchers
realized we shared, was to relaunch a comprehensive Middle East
peace process (Principle #1: start from vision). To give life to this
vision, the journalist proposed that we and the Toledo Center
convene a reunion event in Madrid that would bring together high-
level, unofficial representatives of the regional and international
countries that had participated in the original conference (Principle
#2: be an applied visionary).
The journalist planned to cover the conference. He was not
interested in organizing it, but he wanted it to happen. He believed
that having an American and a Spanish NGO as the principal
sponsors would be a good way to establish a safe space for bringing
together prominent Israelis and Arabs. He chose us to be the
American group because he knew we had been showing up in the
Middle East for the last sixteen years (Principle #4: keep showing
up), so he offered us this opportunity on a silver platter. We had
proved to his satisfaction that we could successfully bring together
well-placed Israelis and Arabs.
We said “yes” to the journalist’s proposal, and we listened
attentively to what he thought such a conference might look like. He
had anticipated many of the details, and we accepted most of his
ideas. However, when it came to paying for the gathering, what he
suggested turned out to be a bridge too far. To finance the
proceedings, he offered to introduce us to a rich American hedge
fund operator who he said was interested in supporting the event.
We were appalled at the idea of taking money from this man
because we knew he was under indictment in the United States for
serious crimes and had fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution.
Even though there would have been nothing illegal about our
receiving a sizable contribution, we stated that we did not want to be
associated with someone with this sort of record. Accepting this
money would not have passed what we called the Washington Post
test. In other words, we would not have liked to read in our morning
newspaper that this individual had paid for the conference. We said
we would be glad to play a key role in organizing the event, but we
would need to find other sources of funding. In the end, that did not
prove to be too difficult, and we were able to work with the Toledo
Center to secure grants from the Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, and
Danish governments.
We Searchers ordinarily took pride in designing meetings with
creative formats that led to concrete action. For the Madrid
conference, however, we realized we would need something
different from our norm. After all, this would be a one-shot affair, and
its main value would be to demonstrate that there was still a high
level of interest in Middle East peacemaking. We expected to have
more than one hundred attendees, who would include a former
president, three former prime ministers, and twelve current or former
foreign ministers.
We surmised that many of the attendees would not be
comfortable with anything participatory or unorthodox. Individuals
like these were used to delivering speeches, and they tended to be
less interested in listening and interacting with others. Therefore, we
worked closely with the Toledo Center to put together a conference
that had a traditional, set-piece format. There was no third-party
facilitation and little informality. The action was to be in the corridors
during coffee breaks and in small meetings held in hotel rooms.
Rather than following our usual practice of hosting participants in
informal dinners with plenty of wine on the table, the Toledo Center
arranged for the King and Queen of Spain to invite everyone over to
the palace for a formal reception.
As we planned the conference, the big unknown was whether a
Syrian delegation would attend. We felt Syria was vital to creating
peace in the Middle East, but its leaders seemed to have an allergy
to Track 2 gatherings—a condition to which we at Search had
contributed thirteen years earlier when we had sponsored unofficial
talks between Syrians and Israelis and the story had leaked to the
press. As Bouthaina Shaaban, a key advisor to President Bashar al-
Assad, later told one of my colleagues, “We thought we—a strong
centralized state—didn’t need any help from civil society. Plus, the
Foreign Ministry felt [there was] competition from nonofficial talks.”
To our great relief, at the last minute we received word that
Syrians would be coming to the conference and their delegation
would be led by Riad Daoudi, the director of the Judicial Department
of the Syrian Presidency and a legal advisor to the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. My colleagues and I were familiar with him because
he had been a top negotiator for the Syrian government for many
years. Although our conference was supposedly an unofficial
gathering, we were pleased that the Syrian regime decided to send
someone with impressive official credentials. That meant, in our
view, that the Assad regime was taking our gathering somewhat
seriously.
At the conference itself, I happened to be seated on the dais only
a few feet away from Daoudi. During one of the breaks, I walked
over and introduced myself. He knew exactly who I was, and he
mentioned my role in the Track 2 talks Search had previously
sponsored between Syrians and Israelis. Our conversation was
cordial, and Daoudi seemed open to engagement. Soon we were
calling each other “Riad” and “John.” We lamented the extent to
which Syrian-American relations had deteriorated in the post-9/1l
world after the George W. Bush administration had made clear that it
was the American way or the highway. Impulsively, I suggested to
Daoudi that Track 2 meetings might be able to produce a blueprint
on how to improve things (Principle #11: cultivate
fingerspitzengefühl). He seemed favorable to the idea, but he said
he would have to check with Damascus before he could make a
commitment.
It took several months for Daoudi to get back to me with a green
light from the Syrian Foreign Ministry and presumably from President
Assad himself. Unfortunately, the Madrid 15 Years Later conference
did not achieve the vision that had originally motivated us, and no
meaningful new negotiations followed. But our engagement did lead
to something constructive—the emergence of a new, unofficial U.S.-
Syrian Working Group (Principle #3: on s’engage, et puis on voit).
Once Daoudi and the Syrians agreed to participate, my
colleagues and I were able to secure funding for the Working Group
from the Norwegian government. To work out the agenda, I headed
off to Damascus, joined by Sam Lewis, the longtime U.S.
Ambassador to Israel, and Rob Malley, then of the International
Conflict Group and more recently President Biden’s emissary for Iran
nuclear talks (Principle #5: enroll credible supporters). We met with
Daoudi and agreed that the Working Group would seek to “normalize
relations between Syria and the United States by bringing together
influential people from both countries to formulate strategies to help
overcome current barriers.”
The first meeting of the Working Group took place in May 2007 in
Damascus. To the American delegation we added Steve Bartlett, a
former Republican congressman who had also been mayor of
Dallas, and Theodore Kattouf, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria
(Principle #5 again: enroll credible supporters). My wife, Susan Collin
Marks, facilitated the meetings, as she had previously done with our
Iranian-American sessions. Although our group was supposedly
nonofficial, a notetaker from the Syrian Foreign Ministry was present
for each session, and the foreign minister himself kept telephoning a
Syrian participant during the group’s working sessions. These calls
were made, of course, in Arabic, but the Syrian who received them
stayed in the room while he talked on his cell phone. Thanks to one
of our American participants who understood Arabic, we received a
briefing on what was said after each session. The foreign minister
clearly was interested in what we were doing, and these calls
confirmed that the Syrian government at the top level was providing
direction to our Syrian participants. Due to Foreign Ministry
involvement, we described the meeting as Track 1.5.
When the first session began, the Syrian and American
participants automatically took seats on opposite sides of the table.
This was the normal seating arrangement in binational gatherings.
Susan sat at the head of the table and asked participants to sit next
to someone from the other country. In this way, instead of
participants facing each other as adversaries, which was largely the
way Syria and the United States were then relating to each other,
participants sat together and took on a shared problem: How to have
better relations between the two countries.
The results of this first meeting were modest but promising.
Participants declared that they wanted to continue the process and
said they would gladly attend future sessions. They agreed to
convey the results back to their respective governments and to urge
them to allow more access and freer movement for diplomats and
journalists. In addition, Sami Moubayed, a Syrian historian and
writer, and Ambassador Theodore Kattouf were tasked with
coauthoring two articles on “What’s the Common Ground between
the U.S. and Syria on Iraqi refugees?” Their work with a shared
byline was subsequently published in Al Hayat, arguably the Arab
world’s leading newspaper. Beyond the specifics, both Syrian and
American participants expressed amazement at the frankness of the
conversations and acknowledged the integrity of the exchanges.

This was much more than I expected.

(RIAD DAOUDI)

In all my years here [in Syria], I never heard conversations of this depth and
candor.

(AMBASSADOR THEODORE KATTOUF)

FIGURE 12.1 John Marks and Tom Dine.

With the strong possibility in 2008 that either Barack Obama or

Hillary Clinton would be elected the next president of the United
States, I wanted to expand the U.S. delegation to include someone
close to the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment. My
choice was Tom Dine (figure 12.1). He and I had been Senate aides
who had worked closely to secure passage of the Case-Church
amendment that cut off funding for U.S. involvement in the Vietnam
War. Now, thirty-five years later, I knew the Syrians might not be
happy with including Dine because after leaving his Senate staff jobs
he had served for thirteen years as executive director of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful lobby
for Israeli causes. But I have always been something of a
provocateur who liked to push the limits, so I went ahead anyway
and invited Dine. My chutzpah-laden move almost led to disaster
(Principle #10: display chutzpah). In retrospect, I came to see that
this might have been an example of bad chutzpah, not the good sort.
 Here is what happened. In preparation for the second meeting of
the group that was to be held in Aleppo, Syria, I sent Daoudi an
expanded list of American participants that included Tom Dine.
Daoudi’s reply was alarming. He wrote back that the participants we
suggested were fine with the Syrian side—except for Dine.
Specifically, Daoudi said, “We will not be discussing, at this stage,
subjects relevant to his interests. I hope that this will not cause any
embarrassment.”
Clearly, the Syrians had strong views about Dine because he had
headed AIPAC, which they saw as a creature of their sworn enemy,
the State of Israel. Dine characterized what the Syrians initially
thought of him when he said, “They think I wear horns.” Regardless,
we at Search felt we could not let the Syrian side dictate which
Americans would be involved in the project. I was afraid that the veto
of Dine was the result of the intervention of top Syrian officials, and
that their decision simply could not be overturned, but I wasn’t giving
up. I sent Daoudi what I considered to be a Hail Mary email: “I think
there may be a misunderstanding about Tom Dine,” I wrote. In fact, I
was pretty sure there was no misunderstanding. However, I did not
want to directly confront the Syrian refusal. I hoped that if I was able
to recast Dine’s exclusion as a misunderstanding, rather than a
direct decision not to include him, it might give the Syrian side the
space to allow him to participate. Such a tactic was pure aikido
(Principle #8: practice aikido.)
In the same email to Daoudi, I also wrote that Dine had stopped
working for AIPAC fifteen years earlier. I emphasized his non-AIPAC
credentials: he had also been an assistant administrator of USAID,
director of Radio Free Europe, and a former assistant to senators
Edward Kennedy, Frank Church, and Edmund Muskie. I added that
he was close to the top echelon of the Democratic Party, and that he
was likely to be in a prominent position if either Barack Obama or
Hillary Clinton were elected in 2008. I concluded:

In sum, he is a man with broad knowledge of the Middle East, and he is exactly
the kind of person who will be needed to support a new relationship between Syria
and the U.S. If he is dis-invited, it could be very embarrassing both for my
organization and for Syria.
Including that last sentence was another act of chutzpah on my part.
I was equating an NGO, Search for Common Ground, with the
government of Syria, and that equivalence was not how things were
supposed to be described in the interchange between governments
and NGOs.
Track 1 officials often had a tendency to regard NGOs as lesser
bodies. But Daoudi had said in his email that he hoped that
excluding Dine “will not cause any embarrassment,” so I figured that
minimizing embarrassment was on his mind. In any case, I felt I had
nothing to lose in pushing the limits with him; if I did not, I feared that
the entire project could be in jeopardy. Somewhat to my surprise, my
approach worked, and Daoudi answered that it would be OK to add
Dine to the American delegation. My appeal proved to be “yesable,”
and the Syrians agreed to give Dine a visa so he could participate in
our meeting (Principle #7: make yesable propositions).
One problem remained to be overcome. Because of Dine’s prior
role with AIPAC, his wife, Joan Dine, was concerned that it would not
be safe for him to travel to Syria. Dine recognized the risk but said,
“This is what I wanted to do, and I thought it was right.” Now that the
Syrians had said he could come, he decided he would take whatever
risk there might be and join the group.
Soon thereafter Dine flew with other American participants into
Aleppo on a night flight from London. Waiting for us even before we
passed through customs was Samir Altaqi (figure 12.2), head of the
Orient Center, a Damascus think tank, and one of the Syrian
participants in the Working Group. He greeted us politely, but he
seemed to only have eyes for Dine. Although the two of them had
never met before, they smiled, shook hands, and then hugged each
other. The rest of us watched in amazement. After all, we lived inside
the Washington Beltway, where men did not usually embrace each
other when they first met. As Dine later put it, Altaqi and he came
together like “thirsty Bedouins at a desert oasis.”
FIGURE 12.2 Samir Altaqi, head of the Orient Center, a nowDamascus think tank.

The Syrian interest in Dine only seemed to increase the next day,
when Daoudi invited him to a private breakfast to discuss current
events in Israel. Dine was still somewhat cautious and did not want
to be accused of being too close to the Syrians, so he invited former
Ambassador Sam Lewis to join him. For Dine, this breakfast meeting
was the first of many gatherings he attended both in Syria and in
Israel to cross-fertilize the prospects for peace. In both countries,
there was a dearth of direct knowledge about the other, and there
seemed to be a huge hunger for firsthand information. Indeed, Altaqi
directly asked Dine to play a “humanizing role” in support of official
Israeli-Syrian talks that were then going on in Turkey. For his part,
Dine readily took on the task of conveying feelings and carrying
messages back and forth. This turned out to be high-level stuff;
Altaqi later told Dine that reports of his conversations were being
given directly to President Bashar al-Assad.
Our meetings in Aleppo lasted for three days and concluded with
a series of agreements. Participants agreed to brief their respective
foreign offices about what had happened. In addition, a retired U.S.
general would be invited to visit Damascus to discuss security issues
related to the ongoing war in Iraq. Dine and Sam Lewis would visit
Israel to explore what might be possible in terms of moving the
peace process forward, and they would share the Syrian perspective
with key Israelis. Participants decided that the next gathering of the
Working Group would be held in the United States and that the
American side would set up meetings for Syrian participants with
U.S. government officials, members of the House and Senate, and
think tank experts.
When it was time for everyone to go home, Dine came to me and
said that he had decided he would not leave with the other
Americans; he had accepted an invitation to drive with Altaqi from
Aleppo to Damascus and spend a few days looking around the city.
As Dine later said, “Track 2 was based on trust. I needed to build a
relationship with this guy and make it happen.” Dine also asked me
to call his wife who had been worried about his safety and let her
know that he would be coming home several days later than
planned. When I got back to Washington, D.C., I had the unenviable
task of telling Joan Dine that I had no idea exactly where her
husband was or what he was doing, and that the last time I had seen
him he was driving off on the road to Damascus in a big black SUV
with his new Syrian friends.
And like Saul of Tarsus on a different road to Damascus, Dine
experienced a major transformation. His time in Syria opened up a
whole new world for him. As he put it, “It gave so much more
meaning to my life.” He discovered a calling that he had no idea he
had, and he became a Middle East peacemaker. He later used a
very nonkosher, nonhalal metaphor to describe how he felt: “I was
like a pig in shit.”
As for me, after I returned home, I dined out on how Tom Dine,
the longtime head of AIPAC, had become a leading participant in our
initiative to improve relations between the United States and Syria.
Dine’s experience was a vivid demonstration that even people on the
extremes—which both AIPAC and Syria were widely seen to be—
could work together in the quest for peace. In other words, this was a
story of a lion laying down with a lamb (figure 12.3), although I never
determined who represented which animal. In any case, I told the
story of Tom Dine in Syria at numerous public presentations and in
many funding appeals. The Syrian adventure that had turned him
into a peacemaker turned out to be an entertaining story that
embodied what we at Search were trying to achieve in improving
relations between the two countries (Principle #9: develop effective
metaphors).

FIGURE 12.3 A lion lays down with a lamb.

Several months later, I decided to take even greater advantage of

Dine’s rapport with the Syrians and his commitment to our vision,
and I asked him to become the hands-on leader of the project. He
readily accepted. His first major task was to plan a ten-day visit to
the United States for three of our Syrian participants. He did not
disappoint us, and he arranged meetings for them with John Kerry
and Howard Berman, then the chairs of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and the House International Relations
Committee. In addition, he set up sessions with several other
lawmakers, a former Secretary of Defense, numerous ambassadors,
key journalists, and think tank specialists. His only setback came at
the order of the Bush White House when the State Department
canceled the sessions he had arranged there.
 The Working Group’s next meeting was in Damascus in January
2009. Perhaps the group’s most notable achievement was to have
both the American and Syrian sides describe what their own country
could do to improve relations. Participants presented long lists. We
found this to be something of a conceptual breakthrough, but the
frankness displayed by the Syrian participants may well have
disturbed Syrian government officials, who continued to monitor our
talks. Soon thereafter, the Syrian government decided to shut down
the project, although we had no idea why they did this. Our Syrian
participants stopped answering our emails, and the government
forced the closure of the Orient Center, the think tank that Samir
Altaqi headed.
We made repeated attempts to stay in touch with the Syrians but
to no avail. Top Syrian officials apparently no longer appreciated the
value of Track 2 proceedings, which they did not fully control. With
the Obama administration having taken over in Washington, D.C.
and indicating that it might be willing to improve relations, the
bilateral relationship returned exclusively to Track 1 diplomatic
contacts. We had learned over the years that Track 2 efforts like ours
tended to be most used—and useful—when official connections
were limited. With the Democrats back in the White House, it was
likely that Syrian officials thought intergovernmental diplomatic
channels should be the sole means for all communications.
We remained active, however, and on two occasions in the
months that followed the U.S. military sent delegations to Damascus
at our urging to discuss security issues. The American aim, which
was never fully realized, was to halt the flow of jihadist fighters
through Syria into Iraq. Also, the Syrian government accepted our
recommendation to reopen the American Language Center, which it
had previously closed as a sign of its opposition to U.S. actions in
the region.
Our Syrian participants remained silent for more than a year.
Then we received a letter from the Syrian ambassador in
Washington, D.C. inviting us, along with the Carter Center in Atlanta
and the Baker Center in Houston, to restart Track 2 meetings. The
main catch was that the ambassador’s list of Syrian participants for
renewed talks did not include any of the individuals who had been
part of our previous working group. In essence, we would be starting
from scratch with new participants handpicked by the Assad regime.
Although we did not like the idea of dropping people with whom we
had developed close working relationships, we accepted the Syrian
proposal.
Dine and Robert Pastor from the Carter Center soon traveled to
Damascus to meet with Foreign Ministry officials and the new
participants to develop an agenda for the first meeting. It was agreed
that a Track 2 process would go forward on the premise that “serious
dialogue at this stage is very much needed.”
The meeting of the revamped group was scheduled to take place
at the Carter Center in Atlanta with ex-President Jimmy Carter
presiding over the opening dinner. But before that happened, an
unanticipated, destabilizing event occurred in December 2010 in
Tunisia. A street vendor set himself on fire to protest the seizure of
his vegetable stand by police because of his failure to obtain a
permit. This triggered protests and demonstrations first in Tunisia
and then across most of the Middle East. These events became
known as the Arab Spring. In Syria, peaceful demonstrations calling
for democratic reform broke out, and the Assad regime responded
with armed force. The anti-Assad side reacted with its own violence
against the government, and the conflict escalated into full-scale civil
war, which has continued for more than a dozen years.
We could not have planned for this sequence of events. No one
on the planet had predicted that the Arab Spring would occur—in
Syria or anywhere else. We did not know that we did not know what
would be coming. Hence we did not have any idea what our reaction
would be (Principle #6: expect the Dunbar Factor).
Not only did the fighting in Syria turn into an absolute tragedy for
the Syrian people, but it also drastically changed the premises
around which we had organized the U.S.-Syrian Working Group.
Improving relations between the Assad regime and the United States
no longer seemed to be a priority as the Assad regime was
slaughtering its own people. The raging conflict had overwhelmed
our deliberative, aikido-laden approach. As peacemakers, we would
have had no problem talking to people close to the Syrian regime,
despite the fact that they were abusing human rights on a massive
scale. For us, however, such an engagement would have needed to
involve Syrian opposition forces, as well as the Syrian government,
and we saw no possibility of bringing the opposition together with the
government.
We explored other approaches. We restarted our relationship
with Samir Altaqi, who had fled to Dubai and reopened the Orient
Center in that city. We worked with him to try to put together an
interreligious dialogue group made up of Sunni, Alawite, and
Christian Syrians. In addition, we convened in Brussels, along with
the European Institute of Peace, a series of meetings that brought
together NGOs involved with Syria. These sessions had a positive
impact in coordinating the NGO response to events in Syria, but after
the Syrian regime backed by Russia and Iran took control of most of
the country, meetings of this sort seemed to lose their value. In 2019,
we finally ended our work with Syria.
Even when social entrepreneurs bring to bear all the operating
principles and all the tools described in this book, one important
lesson to be gained from this Syrian project is that unforeseen
events can make success impossible. As I have said several times in
previous chapters, it is easier to ride a horse in the direction it is
going. Trying to move in the opposite direction is immeasurably more
difficult, and sometimes impossible.
Social entrepreneurship is a risky profession. Sometimes it works
brilliantly, and often it falls flat. Social entrepreneurs need to learn to
live with failure and to transcend it when it occurs.
I wish we had experienced more success with Syria, just as I
wish that there was peace on earth. Both of these goals seem out of
reach at this writing.

OceanofPDF.com
 13
Moving On

A
llen Grossman is my oldest friend and a former chair of
Search’s board. He topped off a successful career in both the
nonprofit and for-profit sectors with twenty years as a
professor at Harvard Business School. According to Grossman,
there are two principal management styles. He labeled the first as
management by rule. It requires employees of an organization to
follow well-defined, internal regulations and procedures. The second
he termed adaptive management. It calls for problem-solving and
decision-making in response to exceptions, new information, and
changed circumstances.
All organizations must have rules, but I was usually much more
interested in being adaptive than in following previously established
plans and procedures. Although I lacked the vocabulary to describe
my management style as adaptive during the years I headed Search,
I was by nature an adaptive manager, as most social entrepreneurs
are. I loved to improvise and break new ground, and I resisted being
hemmed in by bureaucratic restrictions. A new problem or fact often
triggered a revised way of proceeding. Agility and speed were
important because the window of opportunity for effective action
usually remained open for only a short period of time. Thus a verbal
challenge from a colleague stimulated the beginning of Search’s
Burundi programs; a meeting on Lebanon morphed into our regional
Middle East initiative; and an unsolicited suggestion from an intern
provided the impetus for production of The Team TV drama series.
My path forward most often emerged not from a long-term,
deliberative process but from events as they unfolded. As Grossman
put it, “This is a classic entrepreneur’s approach to managing.”
Search provided me with a platform for implementing creative
solutions that were adapted from the situation at hand. This proved
true both in carrying out substantive programs and in dealing with
colleagues. When I saw the possibility of an initiative consistent with
our organizational vision, I was not averse to bypassing the chain of
command or jumping the queue. If staff members came to me with a
problem, I would work with them to find a way to resolve the issue on
its own terms. My solution for one person was often not the same as
my solution for another. When staff members asked unexpectedly for
pay raises or promotions, I usually tried to listen to their request
without turning it down or accepting it. As a believer in aikido, I
avoided direct confrontation, and I asked lots of questions to find
win-win ways of resolving the issue. In other words, I took a different
strokes for different folks approach, and this method of operating
was seen by some staff members as unfair and inconsistent.
As is true with most people, I preferred to work with colleagues I
liked, and I definitely had my favorites, based on both chemistry and
competence. I operated from the premise that the person most
suited to carrying out a task should be the one selected to do it—
regardless of that person’s seniority or position. In the year 2000
when Search was hiring our first Chief Operating Officer (COO),
Susan and I very much wanted Shamil Idriss to get the job, even
though he was only twenty-seven at the time. Two of our more senior
staff members declared that they were not willing to report to such a
young man, but Susan and I felt he was clearly the best candidate
and selected him anyway. Subsequently, one of the people who
objected resigned; the other relented and accepted Idriss’s authority.
Adaptive management worked very well during Search’s first
thirty years or so, and the organization grew like Topsy. By the
standards of the NGO world, we were huge, with six hundred
employees and offices in thirty-five countries. As we expanded,
however, we became victims of our own success. An organization of
that size and complexity required more rules and less adaptation.
 By 2014 I was seventy-one years old, and I had been Search’s
leader for thirty-two years. Susan was sixty-four and had been vice
president for twenty years. Although we were still deeply committed
to the work and the underlying vision of the organization, we were no
longer gaining as much enjoyment as we had experienced in earlier
times. There were already too many rules to suit us. We felt that the
time had come to step down, and we wanted to do so with grace. By
starting early before we were under any pressure to leave, we
thought it would be relatively easy to convince our board of directors,
which had final decision-making power, to select the person we
wanted to replace me as head of the organization.
We were convinced that my successor should be someone who
had considerable experience inside Search. If we waited too long—
or if I was hit by a bus—we were afraid that our board members
would probably hire a head-hunting firm to carry out an extensive
search, for which a steep fee would have to be paid. In the end, we
feared that the headhunters would recommend someone from
outside the organization. We had seen other NGOs get into big
trouble by bringing in an outsider who was not familiar with the
organizational culture and who tried to make substantial changes.
We thought such an approach could be extremely damaging to
Search’s internal cohesion and morale. In short, we believed that
hiring an outsider was a crapshoot, and we didn’t like the odds.
In contrast, we wanted my successor to be someone who had
deep knowledge of how Search functioned. We felt that this person
should be a known quantity with a good idea of what the job entailed.
Our choice was Shamil Idriss—the same person we had selected to
be Search’s COO a dozen years earlier (figure 13.1). He had started
at Search as an intern when he was still in college and worked for us
for thirteen years; then he decided he wanted to see what life was
like outside Search. He became head of a project at the World
Economic Forum (Davos); he played a key role in setting up the
UN’s Alliance of Civilizations initiative; and then he headed Soliya,
an NGO that carried out virtual exchanges on the international level.
In addition to his work inside Search, he also had considerable
outside experience, and that background seemed like an ideal mix.
Idriss was a hugely able, attractive, forty-two-year-old with a great
deal of leadership experience, and we feared that some other
organization would snap him up and we would lose him if we did not
move quickly.

FIGURE 13.1 John Marks, Susan Collin Marks, and Shamil Idriss.

Susan and I informed the board that we were ready to step down
from our posts, and we recommended that Idriss be the next CEO.
As we thought would happen, the board approved, and Idriss agreed
to serve. Since I was in no hurry to go, I was pleased when he asked
for an extra year to be added to the transition period because he had
promised his wife, Cynthia Miller Idriss, a well-known university
professor and author, that he would accompany her while she took a
sabbatical in Germany.
From the moment Susan and I announced that we would be
leaving our posts, we began to lose our ability to guide Search’s
future. Once the transition began, it took on its own energy, and
divergent interests started to emerge. It was clear that the incoming
CEO would shortly be in charge, and that the organization that
represented my life’s work would soon be in other hands. The
prospect, once I fully comprehended it, did not make me feel warm
and fuzzy.
 Search was very much my creation, and I did not want to
completely leave it. But I realized that—inevitably—Idriss was going
to be making changes, and that some of them I would not like. I also
knew that if I stayed in Washington, D.C., my presence might be
perceived as problematic. Nevertheless, I hoped to keep contributing
somehow. I figured that 4,000 miles of separation would be about
right. Susan, for her part, wanted to live in Europe, so we both had
our own reasons for moving to London.
We reached an agreement with Idriss that he would take over as
CEO in September 2014, and we made plans to fly to London. But
the Dunbar Factor intervened in a highly entertaining way. I had
been a longtime fan of singer James Taylor, and I had been on his
mailing list for many years. About four months before we were
scheduled to depart from Washington, D.C. I—and, presumably,
thousands of others—received an email saying that Sweet Baby
James and his band would be traveling on the Queen Mary 2 from
New York to Southampton at a time that fit perfectly with the day
Susan and I planned to leave the United States, and that he would
be giving concerts on the ship. This was a pitch for fans to book
cabins, and the email included a link to James singing the old
Frankie Ford hit, Sea Cruise. Susan and I were hooked. Crossing
the Atlantic by ship seemed like a perfect way for us to make a
voyage into a new phase of our lives. We reserved a stateroom and
sailed east into the sunrise (figure 13.2).
FIGURE 13.2 John Marks and Susan Collin Marks stand in front of the Queen Mary 2 just
before sailing into the sunrise.

After a year in London, we decided to move to Amsterdam, a city

we found more livable and where Susan had relatives, and where we
still live. I have continued to work, but that proved to be much more
complicated than anticipated. Although Search continued to
incorporate my vision and to grow under Idriss’s leadership, it has
become much more an organization governed by rules that no
longer fit well with my adaptive style. Although I understood that an
organizational change of this sort typically occurs when a founder
moves on, it has become increasingly difficult for me to stay
engaged with the organization. As a result, in 2022 I set up a Dutch
nonprofit NGO called Confluence International, which has given me
a platform for continuing the specific projects in which I remain
engaged. Together with my old colleagues at Media Focus on Africa
and Palestine’s Ma’an Network, I have coproduced fifty-two episodes
of the Ms. President reality series in Kenya, and I have also
continued to work with Ma’an in developing several new series. And I
have written this book.
I am proud of what I was able to accomplish as a social
entrepreneur, and I consider myself to have been blessed. Search is
my legacy, and it has made my heart sing.
 The final message I have for those interested in social
entrepreneurship is the same as the one I used to start this book. It
comes from the Persian poet Rumi: “Let yourself be silently drawn by
the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

OceanofPDF.com
 Index

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate
location in the e-book.

9/11 terrorist attacks, 19, 42, 66

60 Minutes, 143

Abaddi, Ahmed, 131

Abazi, Refet, 88
ABC News, 98, 135
Aburdene, Patricia, 75
active listening, 38
adaptive management, 182
African National Congress (ANC), 16, 130, 140
Ahmad, Salman, 134
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 66, 71
aikido, 6, 123–132; blend, 124; dojo, 124
al-Assad, Bashar, 170–171, 176, 180
Al Hayat, 172
All in the Family, 144
al-Qaeda, 42
Altaqi, Samir, 175–177, 179
Amazing Grace, 148
American Idol, 143
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 174–175, 177
American Language Center, 179
Annan, Kofi, 92, 149
applied visionary, 5, 15–29
Arab Spring, 168, 180
Arafat, Yasser, 44
Archers, The, 147
Ashoka, 4
Association Marocaine des Jeunes Médiateurs (Moroccan Association of Youth Mediators),
128
Atherton, Alfred “Roy,” 76
Atomic Energy Organization (Iran), 67
Atwood, Brian, 99
Awad, Nihad, 71
axis of evil, 66

Baker, James, 21–22, 23, 169

Barakomeza, Léonie, 102
Bartlett, Steve, 172
BBC, 24, 40, 125, 147
Beliaev, Igor, 1–2, 18–20, 24
Belkouch, Habib, 125
Bell, John, 45, 168
Belmahi, Mohammed, 129, 131
Berger, Sandy, 60
Berman, Howard, 178
Beška, Violeta, 82
Biden, Joe, 171
bidonvilles, 126
bin Laden, Osama, 42
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 5–6, 30
Bouzoubaa, Mohammed, 129
Bradley, Bill, 161
Bratton, Stanford, 165
Brazilian street theater techniques, 113
Breaking the Silence, 118
Brown, Arthur E., Jr., 21
Buffalo Coalition for Common Ground, 165
Burundi, 91; common ground radio, 94, 97; conceptual framework for, 94; genocide in, 93,
97, 105; hate radio in, 92–94; Ministry of Education, 104; violence in, 91, 93, 97–99,
101; Women’s Peace Center, 101
Bush, George H. W., 21
Bush, George W., 66, 171
business entrepreneurs, 30

Cape Argus newspaper, 143

Carter, Jimmy, 45, 66, 179
Case-Church amendment, 174
Center for Soviet-American Dialogue, 18
Chane, John, 69, 71, 72
Chicago Tribune, 165
Christian Science Monitor, 152
Church, Frank, 174
chutzpah, 7, 153–159
CIA, 3, 9–10, 24–28; mind control programs, 135; and terrorism prevention, 161
Cicippio, Joseph, 24
citizen diplomats, 19, 55
Cline, Ray, 1–2, 24, 26, 27
Clinton, Bill, 51, 52, 60, 66, 145
Clinton, Hillary, 173, 175
Clinton Global Initiative, 145
Cohen, Marilyn, 167
Colby, William, 1–2, 24, 25, 27
Cold War, 9, 12, 18, 19, 29, 36, 62, 134
Common Ground Network for Life and Choice, 166–167
Common Ground News Service, 41
Common Ground on Terrorism (Marks and Beliaev), 27, 28
Common Ground Productions (CGP), 136, 148, 151
common ground radio, 94, 97
common security, 9
Common Security, 10
Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 34–36, 77
Confluence International, 186
Congolese Army, 112, 116, 124; 811th Brigade, 117
Congolese artists, 113
Conrad, Joseph, 110
Conrad, Roger, 97
Constable, Peter, 37
content marketing, 133
Cooper, Kenneth, 75
Core Working Group (Initiative for Peace and Cooperation), 37, 39, 48
Council of Churches (Buffalo, NY), 165
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), 71
counterterrorism, 16, 19–20, 24, 130
credibility, 74–89; borrowing, 74; enhancement for social entrepreneurs, 75–77
Crown, The, 108

Daoudi, Riad, 171–172, 174, 175–176

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 110–112, 120–122, 130; military leadership, 116; as
rape capital of the world, 114
Department for International Development (DFID), UK, 147
Dine, Joan, 175, 177
Dine, Tom, 173–179
diplomacy: domestic shuttle, 99; eclipse, 64; ping-pong, 53; wrestling, 53–61
domestic shuttle diplomacy, 99
Douglas, Melvin, III, 59
Drayton, Bill, 4
Duke, Patty, 148
Dunbar Factor, 90–106, 157
du Pont, John, 53
Eagleburger, Lawrence, 77
ECC-MERU, 114
eclipse diplomacy, 64
elevator speech, 8
entrepreneurs: budding, 74; business, 30. See also social entrepreneurs
Esalen Institute’s Soviet-American initiative, 154
Etheridge, Melissa, 134
ethnic violence, 78, 81, 84, 143
European Centre for Common Ground, 156
European Union (EU), 108, 151, 156
extended metaphors, 133
Eyes on the Prize series, 140–141

Fast Ferry, 118

FBI, 25, 157–159
final cut, 135
fingerspitzengefühl, 7, 160–167
Fisher, Roger, 6, 107
Force More Powerful, A, 143
Ford, Frankie, 186
Ford Foundation, 36
Fraenkel, Edith, 81–82
Fraenkel, Eran, 81–84
Fraenkel, Sarah, 81–85
Frost, Robert, 51
Frowick, Robert, 77–79, 81, 89

Gardner, John, 13
gender-based violence, 119, 121
genocide: in Burundi, 93, 97, 105; in Rwanda, 92
Getting to Yes (Fisher and Ury), 6, 107, 136
Gimme 6, 144
Glaser, Alex, 68
Gligorov, Kiro, 78–79, 89
Gohar, Mohamed, 145
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 15, 33, 156
Grand Ayatollah of Shiraz, 48
graphic storytelling, 133
Gray, Charles, 129
Great Depression, 11
Grossman, Allen, 25, 34–35, 182–183
Gulf War, 27, 35–36
gun violence, 137–139
Hadian, Nasser, 65
Hail Mary, 99
Hale, Alan, 64
Hamilton, Denise, 80
Hampton, Henry, 141
Handgun Control, 137–138
Harper’s Magazine, 166
Harvard University: Harvard Business School, 33, 182; Project on Negotiation, 154
Hassan II, king of Morocco, 124
hate media, 81
hate radio in Burundi, 92–94
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 110
Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 34–35; and Middle
East, 35
Heroes Summit, 96, 110
Hill, Christopher (Chris), 85
Himelfarb, Sheldon, 84
House International Relations Committee, 178
Human Rights Working Group of Middle East initiative, 125
Hunton & Williams, 156
Husseini, Faisal, 42
Hutus, 92, 94, 163; communities, 95; fighters, 102; militias, 102–103; real-life stories of, 96;
reporters, 95; women, 101

I am Curious (Yellow), 50
Idriss, Shamil, 42, 183–184, 185
Inconvenient Truth, An, 63
Initiative for Peace and Cooperation, 36–37, 48; accomplishments, 40–41; Core Working
Group, 37, 39, 48
International Conflict Group, 171
intrapreneurs, 110, 122
investigative reporting, 95
Iran, 66; Atomic Energy Organization, 67; female filmmakers visit to U.S., 64; United States
relations with, 47–73; wrestling diplomacy and U.S., 53–61
Iran-Iraq War, 48
Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, 40
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 42–44

Jackson, Kevin, 59
Jacksteit, Mary, 166
Jadidi, Abbas, 59
JAMAA, 102
Jenkins, Brian, 24
Jerusalem, 42–43, 45, 143, 151
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 36
Jones, Paula, 52
Jones, Zeke, 59
Jordan, Michael, 55

Kattouf, Theodore, 172

Kaufmann, Adrienne, 166
Kennedy, Edward, 174
Kennedy, Robert, 135
Kerry, John, 68–69, 178
KGB, 2, 9, 19, 21, 24–27; Politburo, 27; and terrorism prevention, 27, 161
Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali, 59
Khatami, Mohammad, 54, 66
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 59
Kirby, William, 49, 54, 59, 61
Kissinger, Henry, 99
Kittani, Ismat, 40
Knapen, Ben, 119
Koppel, Ted, 26, 98
Kosovar refugees, 91
Kosovo crisis, 81
Kryuchkov, Vladimir, 24, 27
Kwitny, Jonathan, 3

Laingen, Bruce, 49
La La Land, 148
LaPierre, Wayne, 137–138
Lear, Norman, 144
Lebanon: civil war, 33–34; U.S.-Soviet Task Force on Lebanon, 33
LeBaron, Michelle, 162
Le Meilleur Choix (The Best Choice), 103
Lesarat, 66
Lewis, Sam, 171, 176–177
LGBTQ+ rights, 108
Liebling, A. J., 136
Life & Peace Institute of Uppsala, 50
Literaturnaya Gazeta (Beliaev), 18, 20
Lone Ranger, The, 97
Los Angeles Times, 26
lose-lose approaches, 46
Lydon, Christopher, 163
Lysistrata (Greek drama), 101

Ma’an Media Network, 143, 151, 186–187

Macedonia: Kosovar Albanians in, 85; Nashe Maalo, 84–89; radio stations, 81; schools, 81–
83; Search for Common Ground field office in, 77–80
Madame Prime Minister, 151
Madam President, 151
Madrid 15 Years Later conference, 171
Madrid Peace Conference, 168–170
Mahallati, Mohammad Jafar “Amir,” 40, 48–49, 55–56
Mai Mai militia, 117
Malley, Rob, 171
management by rule, 182
Mandela, Nelson, 105, 130, 140
Marks, Susan Collin, 4, 31–33, 43, 92–93, 109–110, 127, 172, 185; leaving Search, 185;
Middle East program, 49, 51; move to Amsterdam, 186; move to Jerusalem, 42, 143; as
Senior Vice President of Search, 32–33, 183–184. See also Search for Common
Ground
Marley, Ziggy, 104
Masondo, Andrew, 15–16
McCandless, Bruce, 63, 64
McCarrick, Theodore, 69, 71, 72
McCurry, Mike, 62
McNamara, Robert, 41
Megatrends, 75
metaphors, 6, 12, 133–152
#MeToo, 120
Meyer, Cord, 10
Michelman, Kate, 163–164
Middle East, 29, 34–36; Initiative for Peace and Cooperation, 36–37, 48; peacemaking, 170;
peace process, 41; Soviet influence in, 36; win-lose approaches, 38
Middle East Consortium for Infectious Disease Surveillance (MECIDS), 41
Milčev, Vilma Venkovska, 83
Miller, Bill, 47, 66, 69, 72, 158–159
Miller Idriss, Cynthia, 184–185
Millhauser, Marguerite, 22
mobile cinema, 118–119
Mohammed VI, king of Morocco, 124, 128
Monnet, Jean, 13
Montville, Joseph, 18
Moroccan Mediation Authority, 129, 131
Moroccan Olympic Committee, 132
Morocco: aikido-laden approach, 124; Initiative for Human Development, 127; judicial
system, 128; Ministry of Justice, 128–129; terrorist bombings in, 125
Moubayed, Sami, 172
Mousavian, Hossein, 68
Mozaik, 82–83
Ms. President, 186–187
Mulubi Bin Muhemedi, 114–117, 120
music-for-peace programs, 104
Muskie, Edmund, 174
Mutong, Anne, 117

Naisbitt, John, 75
Naisburdenes, 75
Nakba, 44
Nashe Maalo television series, 84–89, 91, 144
Nasr, Salim, 33–34
Nateq-Nouri, Ali Akbar, 59
National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), 163
National Council for Human Rights, 130
National Public Radio (NPR), 136
National Rifle Association (NRA), 137
National Right to Life Committee, 163
Nestlé, 145
New York Times, 167
Nightline, 26, 98, 137
NNTV, 140
Norton, Augustus Richard “Dick,” 21
Norton, Dick, 33–34
Nyerere, Julius, 105

Obama, Barack, 67, 71, 173, 175, 179

on s’engage, et puis on voit, 5–6; and Search for Common Ground, 30, 33; and social
entrepreneurship, 30–46
Operation Rescue, 165, 167
Orient Center, 175–176, 179
Othman, Ra’ed, 143
Ould-Abdallah, Ahmedou, 92–93
Our Neighbors, Ourselves, 97

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 20, 37–38

Palme, Olaf, 9, 50
Palme Commission, 9
Palmer, Ed, 84
participatory community theater, 105
Pastor, Robert, 179
Paula Jones briefing, 52
Pearson, Lester, 17
Pelletreau, Pamela, 45
Pelletreau, Robert, 45
Perry, William, 67
Pillars of Humanity, 96
ping-pong diplomacy, 53
Ponomarev, Vitaly, 21
President, The, 143–144
Primakov, Yevgeni, 34
Prior, Karen Swallow, 167
Pronk, Jan, 142
Prophet Muhammad, 125, 131
publicity for accomplishments, 75–76

Qaddafi, Muammar, 161–162

Quandt, William, 34
Queen Mary 2, 186

Rabin, Yitzhak, 9
Rabita Mohammedia des Oulémas, 130–131
Radio Free Europe, 174
Rand Corporation, 2, 24
Rasul, Suheir, 45–46
Reagan, Ronald, 9, 15
reentry problem, 52
Refugees International, 91
Rich, Bryan, 95, 102
Righteous Gentiles, 97
“ripple” effect, 135
Road Not Taken (Frost), 51
Rosen, Sharon, 45–46
Rosenblatt, Lionel, 91–92
Rosten, Leo, 153
Royal Air Maroc, 132
Rumi, 51, 187
Rumsfeld, Donald, 90
Rwanda: genocide in, 92; Radio des Milles Collines, 92; radio studio in, 93–94
Ryakiye, Yvonne, 102

Safa, Oussama, 126

Said, Abdul Aziz, 9
salami slicers, 15
Salehi, Ali Akbar, 67
Sarkady, Marc, 38
Schell, Jonathan, 9
Schiff, Ze’ev, 40
Schultz, Dave, 53
Schweickart, Rusty, 63
Scram, Celeo,120, 121
Sea Cruise, 186
Search for Common Ground, 3–4, 9–11, 13, 20, 26–27, 89, 129, 154, 175; field office in
Macedonia, 77–80; on s’engage, et puis on voit, 30, 33; U.S.-Iranian relations, 47–73;
and U.S.-Soviet Task Force to Prevent Terrorism, 33. See also Marks, Susan Collin
Search for Common Ground series, 136, 140, 163
Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” The, 135
Search theater troupes, 113
Sebazuri, Louise, 97
Security Working Group, 39–40
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 178
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. See 9/11 terrorist attacks
Sesame Street, 84–85, 87–88, 144
sexually transmitted grades, 121
sexual violence, 114, 118, 120–121, 150
SFCG, 105–106
Shaaban, Bouthaina, 170
Shadow, The, 97
Shape of the Future, The, 42–43, 45
Sherbak, Feodor, 1–2, 24–25, 27
Sherif, Muzafer, 15
Shevardnadze, Eduard, 23
Shields, Pete, 137–138
Shultz, George, 15
shuttle diplomacy, 99–100
Siebert, Hannes, 31, 140
Simon, Scott, 136, 137, 139
Sinduhije, Alexis, 102
Skoll Foundation, 5
Slachmuijlder, Lena, 96, 110, 111, 113, 120
social entrepreneurs: applied visionary, 5, 15–29; credibility, 74–89; elevator speech, 8;
long-term commitments, 47; principles for, 5–7; publicity for accomplishments, 75–76;
and vision, 8–14
social entrepreneurship, 4, 111; aikido, 123–132; applied visionary, 5, 15–29; chutzpah,
153–159; credibility, 74–89; develop effective metaphors, 133–152; fingerspitzengefühl,
160–167; keep showing up, 6, 47–73; principles of, 5–7; and vision, 8–14; yesable
propositions, 107–122
social intrapreneurship, 111
societal conflict prevention, 99, 104
South Africa Searches for Common Ground, 31, 140, 141
Soviet Union: cooperative projects with United States, 18–19; United States delegation to,
20–23
Station, The, 145
Studio Ijambo, 94, 95, 97–98, 102, 104–105, 110, 142
Sultan Qaboos of Oman, 72
superordinate goal, 15
Sutton, Willie, 109, 155
Sweden, 49–50
Syria: civil war in, 168; -Israeli negotiations, 41, 170–181

Takhti Cup, 53
Talking Drum Studio, 105, 142
Tarantino, Quentin, 107
Taylor, James, 185
Team, The, 146, 147–151, 183
teen violence, 103
terrorism, 19, 25–28, 33, 38, 161; bombings in Morocco, 125; United States delegation to
Moscow, 20–23. See also 9/11 terrorist attacks
Toledo International Center for Peace, 168–170
Tomorrow Is a New Day program, 114, 115, 119
top-down peacemaking, 105
Tosalel’ango (Let’s Do It in Lingala), 120–121
Track 2 Libyan-American initiative, 162
Trajkovski, Boris, 89
Tupperware approach to fund-raising, 10–11
Tutsis, 92, 94; communities, 95; fighters, 102; militiamen, 102–103; reporters, 95; women,
101
Tyson, Mike, 31

Ubuntu Films, 143

Under the Same Sun, 151
United Nations (UN): Alliance of Civilizations initiative, 184; General Assembly, 40; High
Commission for Refugees, 114; Security Council, 95
United States (U.S.): cooperative projects with Soviet Union, 18–19; delegation to Moscow,
20–23; funding mujahideen in Afghanistan, 19–20; Iranian art exhibit, 64–65; relations
with Iran, 47–73; State Department, 126; wrestling diplomacy and Iran, 53–61
“unknown unknowns,” 90
Ury, William, 6, 107, 136
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 85, 93, 97, 98, 108, 142, 174
USA Wrestling, 53–54, 61
U.S.-Iran Nuclear Initiatives Group, 67
U.S.-Soviet conflict, 9–12
U.S.-Soviet Task Force to Prevent Terrorism, 19–20, 27, 156, 157; delegation participants,
20–24; and Search for Common Ground, 33; success of, 36
U.S.-Syrian Working Group, 171–172, 180

van Eck, Jan, 100, 104

van Velzen, Femke, 118–119
van Velzen, Ilse, 118–119
Video Cairo Sat, 145
Viet Cong, 20
Vietnam War, 2, 3, 50, 174
violence: in Burundi, 91, 93, 97–99, 101; ethnic, 78, 81, 84, 143; gender-based, 119, 121;
gun, 137–139; sexual, 114, 118, 120–121, 150; teen, 103; violence-prevention
campaign, 79–80; against women, 114, 131
vision, and social entrepreneurs, 8–14
von Hippel, Frank, 68

Wall Street Journal, 97

W. Alton Jones Foundation, 36
War of Independence, 44
Washington Post, 26, 75
Weapon of War: Confessions of Rape in Congo, 119
Webster, William, 27
Weiersmüller, Rudolf, 62–63
We Searchers, 25
West Wing, The, 151
Whitehead, John, 92
Willie Sutton principle, 109
Willke, John, 163–164
win-lose approaches, 3, 38, 46
win-win problem-solving, 3
women: and abortion, 167; Hutus, 101; Iranian, 64; Israeli, 42; Tutsis, 101; violence against,
114, 131; Women’s Peace Center, 101–102
Women’s Peace Center, 101, 102
Working with Killers project, 102
World Economic Forum (Davos), 184
World Trade Center, 42
World War II, 97
wrestling diplomacy, 124, 157; Iran and U.S., 53–61

“yesable proposition,” 107–122

Zarif, Javad, 67, 68–69, 71

Zirakzadeh Scientific Society, 64
Zvezdenkov, Valentin, 1–2, 24, 27, 28–29

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