MADISON – Stuart Hart, one of the world's leading authorities on the implications of sustainable development and environmentalism for business strategy, will be the keynote speaker at a free public forum here Friday, Nov. 2, on business, environment, and social responsibility.
Hart, the Samuel C. Johnson Chair in Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University's Johnson School of Business, will speak at 9:30 a.m. on "Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth and Humanity" at Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center.
A panel discussion at 11 a.m. titled "Perspectives on the Triple Bottom Line" will feature Steve Viederman, past president of the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation, with experience in shareholder activism; Bruce Kahn, second vice president of wealth management and a financial adviser at Smith Barney; and Josh Farley, ecological economist and researcher at the University of Vermont's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics.
"Triple bottom line" refers to the concept that business has social and environmental as well as economic obligations.
The forum is sponsored by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the School of Business, the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy, and the Center for International Business Education and Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hart has published more than 50 papers and written or edited five books. He wrote the seminal article "Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World," which won the McKinsey Award for Best Article in Harvard Business Review in 1997, and helped launch the movement for corporate sustainability. With C.K. Prahalad, Hart also wrote the pathbreaking 2002 article "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid," the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the four billion poor in the developing world.
More recently, Hart authored Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems (Wharton School Publishing, March 2005.) A second edition, Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity, with a foreword by Al Gore, was published in August.
For more information, contact Molly Schwebach, (608) 265-6712, mayoung3@wisc.edu.