Founder, School Leadership Academy

Lorraine Monroe is a nationally recognized teacher, principal and consultant. In 1991, Lorraine opened the Frederick Douglass Academy, an experimental public high school in Harlem designed to break the rules: It would graduate poor city kids and send them to college. Sure enough, test scores at the Academy quickly shot to among the top in all of New York City. And among the first graduating class, 96% of students went on to college. Monroe left the Frederick Douglass Academy in 1997 to found the School Leadership Academy, a business-sponsored non-profit organization that aims to foster creative school leadership. Her first book, Nothing's Impossible: Leadership Lessons from Inside and Outside the Classroom, distills the essence of her more than 30 years as an educator. A second book, tentatively titled 100 Things That Great Bosses do, is due out in 2000.

Read the Fast Company article The Monroe Doctrine in the October 1999 issue.