Innovation + Responsibility

note: this entry has been updated since its original posting

In May 2006 I graduated from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, one of the best business schools in the country  and (in my humble view) the best for studying (and learning how to practically apply) corporate social responsibility in a business context. Last time I wrote about Haas I was just a few months out of school, brand new on the job here at Sun, and thrilled that the Wall Street Journal ranked us #5 (the Journal's ranking is based on recruiters' views of MBA programs).  Well, here we are one year later and I am beaming with pride as I tell you that Haas has moved to #2 in the WSJ rankings! Our ranking for CSR education leadership remains at #2 (I am sure we will get to #1 soon enough!).  The overall rankings jump in just one year is impressive and well-deserved.  As is our position as a leading institution of CSR learning - check out  this story  that also ran in the Wall Street Journal (online).

The Center for Responsible Business at Haas is starting a Socially Responsible Investment fund for students to manage.  This sounds like the perfect opportunity to build "traditional" skills - financial analysis, portfolio management - while infusing them with a "responsibility" mindset.  What a great way to attract new kinds of students to socially responsible investing, and an even better way to demonstrate that CSR does not just fall in the "soft skills" category.

I am especially excited about this program at Haas because I spent a lot of time as a Haas student studying Socially Responsible Investing.  Some classmates and I did an independent study one semester and ended up developing a social investment screen specific to Internet companies.  As part of a research project with Prof. McElhaney and another student (investigating the link between CSR and women), I studied the investment behaviors of men and women to determine if there was an untapped market opportunity for SRI among female investors (there is).  During my summer internship in Budapest, I worked with OTP Bank on market research for a planned SRI fund focused on the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe.  Clearly, I had/have a deep interest in socially responsible investing.  

So it's no surprise, though I hate to admit it, that I was very jealous when I learned about this new program - I would have loved to participate in something like this while in school. In fact, in my Haas application essay I wrote about my strong conviction that socially responsible investing has the potential to have the most significant impact on a company's corporate responsibility actions.  Because let's face it, companies listen to shareholders.  And if shareholders start demanding certain social performance from companies (as we are starting to see with the petition filed with the SEC today by state pension fund managers, institutional investors and others seeking to include climate change risk in financial reporting), companies will start acting.

I will watch the performance of this fund closely - there is so much I can learn, even from afar.