IN MANY WAYS, Deborah Patterson S&L 1986 doesn’t see the work she does for Monsanto, a private, multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation, as all that different from her years working in city government and for the American Red Cross.

“I’ve always been in service, and this is just one more way for me to be in service. I’m passionate about it,” she says from her office in St. Louis, Missouri, where she grew up and where she’s been overseeing the company’s corporate social responsibility and philanthropy efforts since 1997. “People have a sense that companies are somehow these monolithic structures. They think they’re machine-like,” she says. “But it’s really people who’ve come together for a common cause, not unlike what happens in government or the nonprofit world. The corporate social responsibility piece that I work on brings the humanness to companies. We’re all just people who want to conduct ourselves in a way that does no harm.”

For Patterson, corporate social responsibility involves advocating within the company for fairness and transparency and includes working with a team to ensure that Monsanto and its practices do no harm, especially to the communities it serves, farmers, and the environment. Whether it’s creating new tools that can increase crop yield in developing countries or working with corn growers and car manufacturers to increase the use of ethanol, the company adheres to the “Monsanto Pledge,” a commitment to operate with integrity, she says.

“The pledge is what you can judge us against,” says Patterson. “This is how we conduct ourselves. How we’re transparent and respectful.”

These are the same concerns, she says, that she remembers from her days in local government — concerns that made the move to the private sector seamless.

“My government training was very helpful for the transition,” she says. “Government is complex. Managing complexity and understanding how to build consensus is something I had to do with the city council and now have to do with the board. There are also similar budgeting responsibilities and an understanding that what you do may be in the public eye. How you behave is relatively new for companies, but how you behave in government has always been an issue.”

Like many other Kennedy School graduates who have gone into the private sector but have focused on public service, Patterson is quick to credit her family’s influence: “My mother is a giving person who was always doing for others. She also took in kids and fed people. She’s a nurse, my father’s a nurse, and my sister’s a nurse. I didn’t have the stomach for medicine, but this is my way of making things better.”

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