Judy Samuelson '82 visits Yale SOM to talk to the Double Bottom Line SIG

On January 27th, 2004 Judy Samuelson '82 visited SOM to talk to the Double Bottom Line SIG about her work at the Aspen Institute, the current state of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at both corporations and in business school curriculums, the challenges ahead, and efforts needed to further CSR goals.

Judy first spoke about her background, from SOM to banking and the Ford Foundation to Aspen. She spoke about what is going on with CSR - why companies are doing it. She was just up at United Technologies in the morning, where they are trying to institute CSR. Some CSR initiatives at companies are driven from the top-down, some from the bottom-up. Many are driven by fear of consumer backlash from bad publicity - which is quicker to generate now, with the Internet.

During the Q&A session Judy talked about AIDS in Africa and Coca-Cola. She said it won't be the UN that gets the drugs to Africans, it will be Coca-Cola. Only they have the distribution system to do it. She firmly believes that business has the power to make change, and, in fact, that it is the only way that change will happen. She also offered students her perspective on why young people have a low opinion about corporations today, whether or not to go straight into a CSR position at a company, etc.