Genius at Work

For Strickland, $125,000 a year is enough - that's his combined salary for running MCG and BTC. A house in the neighborhood he grew up in, a 1998 Volvo station wagon, a savings account to pay for his daughter's college education, and a closet full of impeccable suits and pressed shirts - for Strickland, these things are enough.

"I don't need the money," he says. "It's not my thing. Don't get me wrong - I do like money. But I don't know that it's ecologically appropriate to hoard millions and millions of dollars. We don't need to have so much wealth concentrated in so few hands. Our culture needs to recognize that having $20 million in the bank is not an absolute requirement for being happy. We have got to be more attuned to the idea that the life experience has its own value."

Strickland speaks with a moral authority that rings true with one particularly unlikely group: young business-school students. After having spent tens of thousands of dollars on a postgraduate education that presumably has them primed for a high-paying job in a high-flying company, business-school grads are probably the least likely group of people to find the nonprofit world attractive.

But they are, in fact, drawn to it - or at least to Strickland's version of it. And that fact alone may be one of the most important indicators that Strickland's hybrid approach to business and philanthropy has a future beyond Pittsburgh. At business schools across the country, Strickland finds that each time he lectures, more students are ready to enlist in the cause.

"At the end of the lecture, students are lined up wanting to work for me," Strickland says. "It's startling. I have students coming up with tears in their eyes, saying, 'You are doing what I want to do with my life.' I say, 'I thought you were in business school because you wanted to run Xerox.' And they say, 'We're here because we wanted to find an opportunity where life could make some sense. You make sense.' Then I tell them, 'We're going to take all this genius, all your enthusiasm, and see the world as a set of possibilities. This is a new game, and I'm one of the guys who's right in the middle of it. Welcome to the conversation.'"

Sara Terry (saratery@aol.com) has written about culture and society for the New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone. Contact Bill Strickland (wstrickland@earthlink.net) for more information about the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild and the Bidwell Training Center.