New Directions in Regulation Seminar Series
Macro Oversight of Micro Banking:  Regulation and Supervision of Microfinance

Jay Rosengard, Lecturer in Public Policy and Director, Financial Sector Program, Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School

RSVP Required to: RPP@ksg.harvard.edu

For more information on the Business & Government Seminar Series, go to the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government's Events page.

SPECIAL EVENT
Growing Inclusive Markets: What role can the private sector play in alleviating global poverty?

What role can, and should large companies play in including the poor as producers, employees, business owners, clients, and consumers along their value chains? What are the major opportunities and obstacles of doing business with the poor in a manner that expands economic opportunity and empowerment and respects human rights, while also making sound business sense? How can large companies work more effectively with governments, nongovernmental organizations, social entrepreneurs, and the poor themselves, to build the foundations for more inclusive and sustainable markets in developing countries?

Join a group of distinguished panelists to explore these questions and learn about UNDP’s Growing Inclusive Markets Initiative and some of the emerging leadership coalitions that are mobilizing the private sector to support the Millennium Development Goals. 

Moderator:
Jane Nelson, Director, CSR Initiative; Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution; and Director, Business Strategy, International Business Leaders Forum

Panelists:
Robert Mosbacher, Jr., President and CEO, Overseas Private Investment Corporation
Bruce Jenks, Assistant Secretary General and Director, Bureau for Resources and Strategic Partnerships, UNDP
Tom Mattia, Senior Vice-President, Global Public Affairs, The Coca-Cola Company
Holly Wise, Senior Fellow CSR Initiative and Founder Director, USAID's Global Development Alliance
Chris Jochnick, Director, Private Sector Team, Oxfam America
with
Jennifer Potter, President & CEO, Initiative for Global Development

Co-hosted by:
The CSR Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP
Initiative for Global Development (IGD)
Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship
with
HKS Business and Government Student Professional Interest Council

For more information, on the Growing Inclusive Markets Initiative go to our July 2008 Featured story.

Business & Government Seminar Series
The Warping of Government Work

Jack Donahue, Raymond Vernon Lecturer in Public Policy and Director of the Weil Program on Collaborative Governance, Harvard Kennedy School

Government has become a refuge, and a relic, of America’s crumbling middle-class economy. As the public and private worlds of work have veered in different directions, the gaps between them are warping government work in unintended ways.

Three decades of economic turbulence have rendered American workplaces more demanding and less secure, more rewarding for high-end workers and punishing for workers without advanced skills. This workplace revolution, however, has largely bypassed government. Public employees—representing roughly one-sixth of the total workforce—still work under the conditions of dampened risk and constrained opportunity that marked most of the economy during the middle-class boom following World War II.

The divergent paths of public and private employment have intensified a long-standing pattern: elite workers spurn public jobs, while less skilled workers cling to government work as a refuge from a harsh private economy. The first trend creates a chronic talent deficit in the public sector. The second trend makes the government workplace rigid and resistant to change. And both contribute to shortfalls in public-sector performance.

The Warping of Government Work documents government’s isolation from the rest of the American economy and arrays the stark choices we confront for narrowing, or accommodating, the divide between public and private work.

Click here for link to the book on Amazon.com.

Business & Government Seminar Series
Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship

Bradley K. Googins, Executive Director, Center for Corporate Citizenship and
Professor of Organizational Studies, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

Philip Mirvis, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Corporate Citizenship
Boston College

Most would agree that business creates or exacerbates many of the world’s biggest problems. Can business also solve them? This is the defining question of an era when corporations have become the dominant global institution and problems such as climate change, a growing rich-poor gap, an obesity pandemic, and disillusionment with rapacious profit-taking cry out for a new way of doing business. Frankly, the majority of companies are ducking this call for action. Even the “good companies” are only nibbling at the margins through the tools of philanthropy, stakeholder consultation, and community involvement. But a vanguard is beginning to apply managerial know-how, marketing savvy, and commercial acumen to problems that have been heretofore pigeon-holed under the labels of corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability. The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship has been studying and working with these firms for decades. Neither critics of nor cheerleaders for business, Googins, Mirvis and Rochlin have amassed a database of evidence––including personal, in-depth interviews with the CEOs of global businesses, hands-on case studies of what’s behind these efforts and what they can and cannot deliver, plus multiyear surveys of business practices––to present a clear-eyed and compelling case that an increasing number of companies and their values-driven leaders are redefining the business-of-business today. Authors Googins and Mirvis discuss their book, Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship. The book takes a practice-oriented look at corporate citizenship, and uses real, behind the scenes examples from well-known companies to show that, for many firms, social responsibility is becoming more integrated into corporate strategy.

PRESENTATION