Conference recap: Economist Corporate Citizenship

Last week, Matthew Bishop, New York bureau chief of the Economist and co-author of The Road from Ruin and Philanthrocapitialism, brought together the best minds in corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the Economist's Corporate Citizenship conference.

The theme of the conference was "Doing Well by Doing Good," and there was an amazing lineup of speakers, including:

• President Bill Clinton
• Jeffrey Schwartz, CEO of Timberland
• Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's
• Dina Powell, Global Head of Corporate Engagement of Goldman-Sachs
• Jeffrey Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation
• and Scott Griffith of Zipcar.

Our CEO, Jean Case, and chairman, Steve Case, kicked off the second day of the conference with Matt Bishop for a conversation on the evolution of corporate citizenship and corporate philanthropy. Here is some of the chatter that happened on Twitter during their discussion:

In the days following the conference, there have been some great blog posts that will give you a sense of the key themes discussed, including the great liveblogging done by Lucia Candu at her Corporate and Responsible blog, who provides an overview of the first day as well as the second (including quotes from Jean and Steve's session). Some speakers and panelists also blogged about their experiences, including:

• John Hope Bryant of Operation HOPE, who spoke about the importance of financial literacy;
• Dr. Angel Cabrera of Thunderbird who pulled out some of the most salient quotes from the first day;
• Jeff Hollender from Seventh Generation who gives a nice recap of the discussions that inspired his own comments on day two of the conference;
• and Chris MacDonald of the Business Ethics blog who contemplates questions he had hoped would be asked of his fellow panelists. 

Finally, Matthew Bishop discussed the conference in a post on the recent Supreme Court ruling that granted corporations full first-amendment political rights as people.

Over at the triplepundit blog, Cindy Mehallow has a great list of recommendations from CSR leaders at the conference, and at the Business Ethics magazine site, they cover a discussion during which Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund talked about his organization's work with Wal-Mart to improve the retailer's sustainability initiatives.