Biography

After completing my military service, I served for five and a half years as a Visiting Associate Professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business where I taught in Harvard's middle management, M.B.A. , and doctoral programs. I also served as the Harvard Business School advisor to the Nicaragua-based Central American Management Institute. I subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where I headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family planning programs. For a time Fran and I both held faculty appointments at the Harvard School of Public Health where we taught a course on international family planning management.

Ford Foundation and USAID

In the late 1970s, Fran and I left U.S. academia and moved to Southeast Asia, where we lived for nearly fifteen years with Fran serving as a Ford Foundation program officer in Manila and Jakarta. I too joined the Ford Foundation, serving as a project specialist working with management institutes around the world. Later I became Asia regional advisor on development management to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help AID apply what we had learned in the Ford Foundation about organizational change strategies for transforming large-scale public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources. In this capacity I traveled regularly between Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Leaving the Establishment

Disillusioned by the evident inability of USAID and other large official aid donors to apply the approaches that the nongovernmental Ford Foundation had developed and proven, I eventually made my break with the official aid system. My last five years in Asia were devoted to working with leaders of Asian nongovernmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to function as strategic catalysts of national- and global-level change.

Gradually I became aware that the crisis of deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration I was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world—including the United States and other "developed" countries. In 1990, I joined with colleagues from around the world to found the People-Centered Development Forum as a support network for those who were seeking to challenge the dominant development paradigm. I have since served as the Forum's president and principal spokesperson. As my analysis of the global crisis deepened, my Asian colleagues suggested that I might best help them in their cause by returning to the United States to educate other Americans in the devastating negative impact on democracy, people, and the environment of U.S. economic and political policies around the world.

Taking on the System

In 1992, Fran and I moved to New York City. Fran transferred to the Ford Foundation's New York office to continue her work as a Ford Foundation program officer, and I began the research that led to publication of When Corporations Rule the World . Our apartment, located in the heart of Manhattan just off Union Square between Madison Avenue and Wall Street, proved an inspirational setting for this undertaking.  In 1994, I accepted an invitation to join a gathering of global activists working on trade issues that led to the formation of the International Forum on Globalization, an alliance that assumed a major role in building global awareness of the dysfunctions of corporate-led economic globalization.

Search for Alternatives

Following the launch of When Corporations Rule the World in 1995, my attention turned increasingly to a search for alternatives to the destructive patterns of global corporate rule.

YES! Magazine

The beginning of 1996, I co-founded with Sarah van Gelder and other colleagues the Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! magazine, and have since served as board chair. In 1998 Fran and I moved to Bainbridge Island in Washington state, the home of YES! and the heartland of Ecotopia.

A New Economy

Bainbridge Island proved an optimal setting in which to complete the manuscript for The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, which was launched at the United Nations headquarters in New York City in March 1999 as a sequel to When Corporations Rule the World focused on framing a positive alternative to corporate rule based on living system principles. I contributed to writing a consensus report of the International Forum on Globalization titled Alternatives to Economic Globalization, published in 2002, that remains the single most comprehensive and authoritative articulation of the design for a just, democratic, just, and sustainable planetary economic system. This same year the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) was launched to advance the emergence of a new economy built on a foundation of locally owned independent businesses and free from the dysfunctions of corporate rule. I helped frame the underlying rational and strategy of BALLE and am a founding board member.

Mapping the Turn to Earth Community

In the summer of 2002, my long time friend and IFG colleague Indian activist Vandana Shiva visited Bainbridge Island. Our conversation turned to the events following the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States and the disarray into which these events threw global civil society and the resistance movement against corporate-led economic globalization.

As she so often does, Vandana made a pivotal observation. She noted that global civil society had coalesced around the analysis of corporate globalization to which we have both contributed. After 9/11 the U.S. government announced its intention to use the full force of the U.S. military to impose imperial order on the world and secure U.S. interests. The movement needed a larger framework. We invited our colleague, Philippine activist/intellectual Nicanor Perlas to join us in writing  "Global Civil Society: The Path Ahead," which set forth the framework I later expanded into The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.

Other Resources

See introductions for a few key facts useful in making an introduction.  Follow the affiliations link for more information on my current organizational affiliations. Those interested in a more extensive reflection on the pathway of the intellectual journey that led to my current work are invited to read an interview by the University of Washington Center for Communication and Civic Engagement.