Innovation + Responsibility

Interns
First and most importantly, I am looking for a summer intern. A first year MBA student who can work in the Bay Area (s/he doesn't have to be based here) to help our team on various CSR and Eco related projects, including the development of our next CSR report (coming this Fall!), our stakeholder engagement program and other initiatives. I am not even sure anyone reads this blog regularly, but if you do and you are (or you know) a fantastic MBA student looking for a cool opportunity for the summer, please go to Sun's Student Zone and apply here. I tried to create an internship that I would have wanted to do when I was getting my MBA (if I hadn't instead gone to Budapest for the summer to explore CSR in an emerging market and to also explore the life of a Hungarian wife!), so I actually think it's going to be a really great learning experience and a chance to do some real CSR-related work.

Stakeholder Engagement
Last week we kicked off the first prong of our stakeholder engagement program - the Sun Employee CSR Advisory Board. Approximately 20 Sun employees joined, via phone and in-person, for the initial discussion. It was a great and lively exchange with folks from all over the world (special props to Lori in Australia who called in at 3am her time!). I spent a good amount of time answering questions and then people just started offering up ideas and even challenging some of my assumptions. I recognize that not everyone in this group is going to stay fully engaged on CSR at all times - after all, they have other jobs to do! - but they definitely seemed fired up and eager to share their thoughts. As importantly, they seemed eager to be part of integrating CSR more deeply into Sun's culture. The best question was, "Where can I get information that tells me how I might be able to better integrate CSR into my day-to-day job?" Of course, I didn't have a ready answer to that one! But what I did tell them is that Sun's Eco Responsibility Program Manager (my partner in crime, Lori) and I were getting ready to launch an online community for Sun employees to discuss and debate anything and everything CSR (if you are a Sun employee and you want to know more about that community, shoot me an email and I will send you the link). We announced it to a small group yesterday and ten new members signed up already. It's my hope that the community will continue to grow and the discussion across and around Sun will spread.

Our external stakeholder engagement program is coming along, and I am really looking forward to our first meeting on May 17. With NGOs, customers, investors and Sun executives all in the room together, it is sure to be a spirited interaction! I am a little bit nervous but the folks from Ceres (who are going to facilitate the program) tell me that I should be nervous. In fact, they said, I should not be 100% comfortable with everyone that is invited. The idea is to get people in the room who are comfortable challenging our thinking, who may have a different but valuable perspective that we need to hear.

And More!
last week was a bit of a crazy week for me but it was worth it because I was exposed to some really interesting things. First of all, I went to the big Haas Alumni event at Gap Headquarters. Scott McNealy (one of Sun's founders) was going to be "in conversation" with Gordon Moore (Intel's founder and the Moore in Moore's law), moderated by Dean Campbell. The theme of the discussion was "Innovation." Before the event, though, there was a meeting between Scott, his wife Susan, Kim Jones (Sun's VP of Global Government, Education and Health Care), Gordon Moore and Tom Campbell to talk about Scott's amazing open source education project, Curriki. [Full disclosure: A dear dear friend of mine works at Curriki part-time; we have been friends for 15 years; his work at Curriki - and Curriki in general - is totally unrelated to my work at Sun. I just think it's cool!] Scott invited me to sit in on the meeting. Not participate (what would I say!?), but attend. And I was grateful for the opportunity. How many times in my life will I get to sit in the same room as these two giants of the technology sector? My guess is one time - and this was it!

The other cool event I went to last week was the Bay Area launch for the Grameen Foundation's Mifos Initiative. Mifos- or Microfinance Open Source - is an effort to create an open source technology backbone for the microfinance industry so that more lenders can reach more borrowers more effectively and efficiently. The Grameen Foundation wants to scale microlending - the goal is to reach 5 million borrowers! Technology is going to be an important component of enabling that scale. The other exciting thing is that java.net hosts a Mifos initiative developer community.

Planet Earth
Have you seen this insane documentary on the Discovery Channel? If not, you should. I Tivo-ed it this past weekend and have been watching it little by little each night. It's an 11-part documentary that took four years to film. The filmmakers go to the corners of the earth - literally - and capture on film some of the most mesmerizing and confounding natural wonders. My favorite so far has been the mating rituals of Birds of Paradise. Although the footage of the craggy Alps and the towering Himalayas was also jaw-dropping. After watching the first part, I sent an email to my "green" friends encouraging them to watch it, too (yes, I am one of those people!). Because if you work in this space - corporate social respnsibility, environmental advocacy, etc. - and if, as my good friend Libby likes to say, you ever have an aching forehead from banging it against the wall all day, this documentary will help you realize why we bother. This planet is truly amazing.