When Corporate Responsibility Means Going Local
Abhijit Upadhye, Supply Chain Management, McDonald's India
McDonald's has migrated to India, and with it, a commitment to corporate social responsibility. In this university podcast, executive Abhijit Upadhye discusses how the introduction of the "golden arches" into the subcontinent over the past six years has resulted in the creation of local opportunities in the areas of agriculture and food production, storage, and transportation.

Disaster Response: Lessons Learned from Haiti
Paul Auerbach, Professor of Surgery,
Stanford University
When disaster strikes somewhere in the world, what kind of leadership, nonprofit management, and supply chain expertise are needed? In this university podcast, Stanford professor of surgery, Paul Auerbach, shares lessons learned from the Stanford Emergency Medicine rapid response team's deployment in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake. His experiences provide a glimpse in to how relevant groups may prepare themselves to better assist in future global catastrophes.

Social Enterprise in Food Supply Chains:
Panel Discussion
In the arena of social enterprise, a California collaboration is creating a high yield. In this university podcast, executives Diane Del Signore and Maisie Greenwalt share how Community Alliance with Family Farmers and Bon Appétit Management Company have partnered to create a local distribution system to get locally grown products into institutional settings. They also talk about efforts to help farmers become more organic.

Corporate Social Responsibility with Cotton Farms
Michael Kobori, VP, Social and Environmental Sustainability, Levi Strauss & Co.
With corporate social responsibility as a business imperative, Levi Strauss has evaluated how well its suppliers are doing on making cotton production more sustainable. In this university podcast, executive Michael Kobori discusses the company's efforts to support organic cotton farming that reduces water use and relies less on child labor, particularly in Uzbekistan.

Environmental Sustainability in Supply Chains
Joao Paulo Ferreira, VP, Operations and Logistics, Natura Cosmetics Brasil
How can a company put environmental sustainability into its DNA? In this university podcast, Joao Paulo Ferreira, VP of operations and logistics, talks about Natura Cosmetics Brasil's supply chain and its challenges to embed sustainability concepts into the way it is designed and operated. He discusses the company's culture of collaboration with indigenous communities, NGOs, and other organizations.

Corporate Social Responsibility in Supply Chains
Dawn Vance, Director of Global Logistics, Nike
Nike has taken the call for corporate social responsibility seriously, particularly when it comes to working with suppliers. In this university podcast, Nike’s director of global logistics, Dawn Vance, talks about the company’s journey to integrate sustainability into the supply chain from design through delivery to the retail marketplace. She discusses collaborative models with factory partners, logistics providers, stakeholders, and industry conditions, as well as the organization’s work on business models that will be responsible for the fate of products from cradle to grave.

Improving Healthcare Distribution
in Africa
Andrea Coleman, Chief Executive Officer
Barry Coleman, Executive Director
Riders for Health
In the late 1980s, when Barry and Andrea Coleman noticed that motor bikes intended for use in the delivery of health care in Africa were not being used because they had broken down -- in some cases needing mere $3 oil filters -- they knew they had to put their own pedal to the metal. Speaking at the 2009 Responsible Supply Chains Conference at Stanford, they share some of the successes and challenges associated with running Riders for Health, which administers vehicles to keep health supplies flowing efficiently throughout the continent.

Gap's Progress on Corporate Social Responsibility
Dan Henkle, Senior Vice President, Gap Inc.
When clothing giant Gap took its first steps toward corporate responsibility in 1992, it wasn’t aiming for anything extraordinary from its suppliers—just for workers to receive the basic minimum wage, overtime premiums, and a cap on workable hours. In contrast, today the Gap has bigger ambitions, according to Dan Henkle, the company's senior vice president for social responsibility. In this talk, Henkle discusses the Gap's efforts to encourage more suppliers to operate responsibly. Download the PowerPoint slides for Social & Environmental Responsibility in the Gap Inc. Supply Chain (pdf). [news story]

Boosting Profits through Social Responsibility
Hau Lee, Professor,
Stanford Graduate School of Business
An irrigation-system producer from Israel makes complex technology available to poor farmers. A business helps small farmers and their middlemen in India get higher prices for crops. A garment maker in China practices sustainable manufacturing. These are just some of the success stories demonstrating how small to mid-sized companies can make money while operating in socially responsible and environmentally friendly ways. Hau Lee, Stanford Business School professor, highlights such examples, emphasizing that successful responsible supply chains share risks, gains, and costs, and have a partnership mentality. Download the PowerPoint slides for AAA Value Chains: Agility, Adaptability and Alignment (pdf). [news story]

Strategies for Improving Product Safety
A Panel Discussion
Business was booming for the literacy firm Raising A Reader®, a nonprofit that helps underprivileged children learn to read—until a routine test of the tote bags the company supplies to low-income families reported extraordinarily high levels of lead in the bag’s lining. Dagoba Organic Chocolate similarly hit turbulence after a routine test of its premium chocolate in 2005 found unacceptable levels of lead. In this panel, entrepreneurs detail how they traced product safety problems to their suppliers, rectified the errors, and rode through such crises to stay in business. The key ingredient to solving and preventing such problems, the panelists stress, is maintaining good relationships with suppliers. [news story]

Fresh Approaches to Supply Chain Practices
A Panel Discussion
World of Good, Nau Inc., and the San Francisco Department of the Environment are three organizations dedicated to promoting social and environmental well-being through their core business activities, their fresh approaches to supply chain practices, and their work to influence others in their industries. In this panel discussion, leaders from each organization talk about the structure and mission of their enterprises, and how they have integrated their commitment to greenness and social responsibility in the way they manage the supply chain. Topics include fair trade, sustainable design, green purchasing, and public/private partnerships.

Corporate Responsibility as Innovation Engine
Hannah Jones, Vice President Corporate Responsibility, Nike
Nike has traveled the full range of the corporate responsibility movement, from the campaigning days when it was a poster child for all things to do with poor working conditions through the era of multi-stakeholder partnerships. Nike has now moved into the next phase, where corporate responsibility becomes part of the business model. Hannah Jones, Nike's vice president for corporate responsibility looks at the future of corporate responsibility as the focus shifts upstream.

Doing Well and Doing Good in the Supply Chain
Gary Smith, President Outdoor Group, Timberland
Timberland, the footwear and apparel company headquartered in New Hampshire, is putting good old New England values to work to integrate socially responsible management practices throughout the value chain. Timberland's president, Gary Smith, proves in the more than 35 countries where his firm has a business presence, that doing good does not have to be at odds with doing well.

Social and Environmental Responsibility at HP
Tony Prophet, Personal Systems Group, Worldwide Supply Chain Operations, HP
With energy costs on the rise and the U.S. government expected to push steadily for reduced carbon emissions, environmental responsibility throughout supply chains has become a market imperative. That understanding drives Hewlett-Packard's global citizenship agenda to design for the environment, encourage suppliers to be socially and environmentally responsible, use energy efficiently, and enable product recycling.

Making Supply Chains Socially Responsible
Willard Hay, Starbucks
Starbucks has developed guidelines for creating and maintaining a sustainable supply chain, which it calls Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices. These coffee-buying guidelines help the company establish equitable relationships with farmers, workers, and communities. In this opening keynote of the conference, Willard (Dub) Hay explores what's making C.A.F.E. Practices successful.

Green for Less
Lawrence Jackson, Former President and CEO Global Procurement, Wal*Mart
For Wal-Mart, social responsibility includes keeping products affordable to the millions of low and middle-income consumers who form the bulk of its customer base. Bringing the perspectives of someone who grew up in inner city Washington, DC, Lawrence Jackson, former Wal-Mart president and CEO for Global Procurement, asked his Stanford audience to consider whether pushing for social and environmental responsibility in business is a racially and economically segregated movement.

Inspiring Environmentally Friendly Supply Chains
A panel discussion featuring: Dean Edwards, Kaiser Permanente; David Jones, EPA; Jeff Mendelsohn, New Leaf Paper Buyers and procurement professionals have more power than ever to exert pressure on suppliers to provide green products. Businesses are also partnering with government and nonprofits to create change in this arena. How do you communicate with suppliers on environmental innovation? Executives from an HMO, a government agency, and an entrepreneurial company share successes in greening the supply chains.

Measuring Corporate Social Responsibility
A panel discussion featuring: Bethany Heath, Chiquita Brands International; Michael Jarvis, World Bank; Mike Loch, Motorola.
Companies around the world are trying to figure out how to evaluate their performance--as well as that of their suppliers--on a host of corporate social responsibility (CSR) dimensions in areas such as diversity, community development, and environmental issues. How can CSR influence business initiatives and the value of CSR efforts be measured? Managers from Chiquita, Motorola, and the World Bank share lessons and resources.

Collaborations on Sustainability in Electronics
A panel discussion featuring: Gráinne Blanchette, Solectron Corporation; Edna M. Conway, Cisco; Judith Glazer, Hewlett-Packard; and Danielle Harder, Microsoft.
The electronics industry is on the forefront of the movement to improve socially and environmentally responsible performance across manufacturing and supply chains. What is the business case for such collaboration? What are the challenges? Why has the electronics industry been particularly successful in this regard?