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Newsletter: April 2006

Dear FLOW members,

One of FLOW’s great challenges is to encourage people to understand that entrepreneurial freedom leads to unbounded creativity, establishing a new norm. There are three difficult barriers to achieving the understanding and the reality of liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good™, which is the mission of FLOW:

1. Fear of Freedom. Many people are hostile to, and frightened by, freedom. Freedom is, by its very nature, disruptive and therefore dangerous. (See Virginia Postrel’s wonderful book The Future and Its Enemies for more on those who are afraid).
2. Fear of Risk. Creating new enterprises is not the simple creativity involved in feeling good about being different. Creating new enterprises, the most important manifestation of creativity, involves putting one’s life, reputation, and livelihood on the line month after month, year after year, often in the face of rampant misunderstanding and hostility.
3. Attachment to the Status Quo. The vast majority of those who educate us, in schools, universities, as researchers, and as journalists, have never created an enterprise from scratch. Thus the most important fact about the future, that new institutions can and will be created, is not a visceral reality for those who form all of our minds, and they have a vested interest in maintaining things the way they are.

I was reminded of these three barriers while speaking at the 10th Annual Young Entrepreneurs Summit in Sao Paolo, where for three days I was surrounded by people from all over the world who were creating things from scratch. It was an extraordinary experience to be immersed in such an environment; the immersion in a world of creators was necessary to call my attention to how invisible this phenomenon is to most of us most of the time.

Nkhensani Manganyi is an extraordinarily beautiful and articulate young jewelry designer who is going to change the world’s perception of South Africa by means of her cutting-edge urban-Afro designs. She wants the world to perceive South Africa as the coolest, hippest, most vibrant multi-cultural place on earth. What impressed me most was her unabashed ambition not merely to create a company, but to transform cultural realities. Can she do it? We don’t know. Could she do it without her conviction? Not a chance.

I also met Tracy Carroll, the creator of Flexcar. Flexcar (as with its competitor Zipcar) allows people to reserve cars online and to pick them up at various convenient destinations near public transit, train stations, and airports. Unlike rental cars, once one is signed up as a customer Flexcars require no delays at all – one can come out of a subway station and walk up to a car just as if one owned it, then park it at another location without checking it in with anyone. Flexcars are designed to be almost as convenient as owning a car but without the cost and hassle. Most advocates of mass transit are hostile to the personal automobile, yet most people refuse to ride mass transit unless it is as convenient as owning a car. For some people, Flexcar provides the requisite convenience.

I met Flavio Melo, who created Exploranter, a high-end road caravan voyage through South America. Flavio is motivated by an absolute passion for exotic and unknown destinations in Brazil, yet he realized that in order to attract people to the truly unknown he would have to start with the known. Thus he started by offering road trips to Patagonia with gourmet cooking along the way in a rolling five-star hotel. But now that customers have come to trust the amazing travel experiences he provides, he has expanded his offerings to include those secret places that he so wants to share with others.

In very different ways each of these (and dozens of others I met) have created a new reality that had not existed (or will not exist) without their personal commitment, vision, and will. Increasingly as I listen to arguments in the media and among pundits, every word I hear I filter through my FLOW glasses: “Does this person who is talking understand creative possibility?” If they do not, and the vast majority does not, I appropriately discount their authority.

This is why FLOW is proud to have developed the Working for Good curriculum, designed to liberate the minds and spirits of young people so that they understand the power of creative vision combined with a personal commitment. The Working for Good curriculum is available as a download. An eighteen year-old blogger has already provided a great review of the curriculum:

“The basic purpose of this "curriculum" is to ignite the passion in people throughout the world to become better entrepreneurs, not necessarily in the "start your own business" sense, but more in the "individual initiative to change the world" sort . . . Mm, this stuff just makes me all warm and fuzzy. Optimism, you win the day!”

In a world of conflict, argument, debate, and cynicism, FLOW is setting out to transfer the vision and the personal tools to more and more people who want to create a meaningful life for themselves by making a better world. Please visit the Working for Good website and tune in to our webcast on May 2nd, 3rd and 4th, to get a taste of FLOW’s first substantial outreach and education project.

FLOW Website Update

Featured on our home page this month you will find:

"Areté and the Entrepreneur" by Brian Johnson, Philosopher & CEO of Zaadz, a company merging spirituality, capitalism and technology to change the world by inspiring and empowering people to live at their highest potential while using their greatest strengths in the greatest service to the world. This piece and the next are also included in the Working for Good Curriculum.

"J.B.’s Story" by Marilyn King, two-time Olympic pentathlete and creator of Olympian Thinking™a program designed to catalyze entrepreneurial creativity into action.

A brief review of Gregg Easterbrook’s book, The Progress Paradox.

An introduction to Idealist.org, a wonderful resource with a database of more than 50,000 non-profit organizations throughout the world.

FLOW Events

If you live in New York or Washington, DC, there are two FLOW-related gatherings coming up, to which you are invited:

FLOW Advisor will hold her monthly FLOW gathering in New York City on Thursday, April 6 at Cinema, 2 East 45th Street from 5:00 to 7:00pm. It is an “open event for anyone in town to come and tell us about their business or non-profit that's making the world a better place. Come and meet fellow travelers or just have a beer. Hope to see you... best, Susan”

And FLOW friend is presenting his monthly Conscious Entrepreneurs and Creatives (CEC) event, sponsored in part by FLOW, in Washington, DC Saturday, April 8 at Spiral Flight Studio, 1826 Wisconsin Ave., NW, from 7:00 to 10:00pm. The evening will include an art show, creativity talk and reception catered by local restaurant Casbah, for free! Click here to RSVP.

Finally, I would like to thank Susan Niederhoffer, Charlie Frohman, and Phyllis Blees for hosting FLOW groups in NYC, D.C., and Austin, respectively. Please contact us if you would like to begin hosting FLOW groups in your area.

Coming soon: we will soon post our first audio program – a recording of a conversation between FLOW co-founder John Mackey and Ken Wilber, prolific thinker and author and founder of the Integral Institute.

Please send your ideas, questions, and stories to us.

Yours in FLOW,

Michael Strong, CEO & Chief Visionary Officer

P.S. FLOW is above all a forum of free exchange for its members in the quest for sustainable peace, prosperity, and happiness. We welcome your feedback to the content of this newsletter and all FLOW activities and publications. Please send your thoughts to .

P.P.S. Please join one of our five themed discussion groups, and participate in our active and growing community, at www.flowrealism.org or www.flowidealism.org (FLOW, where idealism and realism both lead to the same place).