From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurs are people who launch ventures aimed at promoting positive change in their community and the world. Their bottom line is not financial profit but the common good. Drawing on his extensive career, John Marks has written a practitioner’s guide to the underlying principles of social entrepreneurship.

From Vision to Action offers a master class in effective negotiation and conflict resolution. It builds on a core strategy of understanding differences and acting on commonalities. Marks uses his own experiences of creating real-life breakthroughs during his time leading Search for Common Ground, which he founded and built with his wife, Susan Collin Marks, into the world’s largest peacebuilding nonprofit. Beginning with an improbable effort to promote cooperation between the CIA and the KGB, this book features examples that range from helping prevent genocide in Burundi to using children’s television to lessen ethnic tensions in Macedonia to creating a culture of mediation in Morocco. Readers learn key lessons, such as adapting to unexpected outcomes, communicating persuasive stories, and being incrementally transformational--or transformationally incremental. Bringing together compelling narratives and useful tools, From Vision to Action delivers practical guidance on building bridges and creating meaningful change.

John Marks is the founder of the renowned peacebuilding organization Search for Common Ground, which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. When he stepped down as its president after thirty-two years, the organization had a staff of six hundred full-time employees and offices in thirty-five countries. He is now the founder and managing director of Confluence International and a visiting scholar in peacebuilding and social entrepreneurship at Leiden University. Coauthor of the controversial New York Times best-seller The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence and the award-winning Search for the ＂Manchurian Candidate,＂ Marks also founded Common Ground Productions and has produced TV series promoting nonviolent coexistence in twenty-five countries.