The Art of Leadership – Bill Strickland
Founder & Executive Chairman of Manchester Bidwell Corporation
World-Renowned Social Innovator
For more than 55 years, Bill Strickland has been an innovator in the service of providing underserved people with learning and healing environments that inspire hope and shatter expectations for what they can achieve.
As a college student in 1968, Bill founded Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild to give the youth of his neighborhood a place to learn pottery as a safe alternative to the streets. In 1972, he assumed leadership of a struggling building trade school and ultimately combined the operations under one roof. Over the years, other operations were added, including five-time GRAMMY®-winning MCG Jazz, one of the longest-running jazz subscription series in America. Today, the Manchester Bidwell Center (MBC) serves hundreds of under-resourced youth and adults every year in a host of vocational training and arts disciplines, including culinary arts, medicine, photography, and digital imaging.
Since founding MBC, Bill has guided the creation of more than a dozen centers. What started as a few pottery wheels in a basement in Pittsburgh has become a constellation of world-class vocational training & cultural enrichment centers in the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Israel.
Bill is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellows “Genius” grant and has been awarded the Goi Peace Award, as well as more than 25 honorary doctorate degrees. His work transforming lives has been the subject of four Harvard Business School case studies to date. He is the author of "Make the Impossible Possible" with Vince Rause and is the subject of a forthcoming documentary film produced by Wayfarer Studios.