 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.
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 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.
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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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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?
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