Contact: Linda Lehrer
Communications Director
Business & Society Program, The Aspen Institute
(212) 895-8002?linda.lehrer@aspeninstitute.org
New York, NY, September 16, 2009 – The Aspen Institute Center for Business Education (Aspen CBE) announced today the winners of the 2009 Faculty Pioneer Awards. Dubbed the “Oscars of the business school world” by the The Financial Times, this annual recognition celebrates business school instructors who have demonstrated leadership and risk-taking in integrating social, environmental and ethical issues into the MBA curriculum. This year’s winners will be celebrated on November 6th at an awards breakfast at Ernst & Young’s corporate headquarters in New York’s Times Square.
“Now more than ever before we are witnessing the substantial influence of business on society,” said Rich Leimsider, Director of Aspen CBE. “It’s the trailblazing research and teaching of these Faculty Pioneers that will prepare future business leaders to make the most of this influence, by leveraging successful businesses to create positive social impacts.”
The 2009 Faculty Pioneers Award winners are:
- Lifetime Achievement: Thomas Donaldson
Mark O. Winkelman Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania - Gregory Fairchild, Associate Professor of Business Administration
The Darden School of Business, University of Virginia - Michael Lenox, Samuel L. Slover Professor of Business
The Darden School of Business, University of Virginia - Rising Star: Jay Golden
Assistant Professor at the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University
This year’s winners were selected from over 125 nominations submitted by respected academics and business executives; self-nominations are not considered. Finalists were selected by Aspen Institute staff in consultation with prominent academics; winners were selected by a panel of corporate judges. This year’s final-round judges were:
• Dan Bross, Senior Director of Corporate Citizenship, Microsoft
• Andrea Doane, Director of Corporate Giving and Community Affairs, United Technologies
• Deborah Holmes, Global Director of Corporate Responsibility, Ernst & Young
• Lauren Iannarone, Head of Downstream Policy and Stakeholder Relations, Shell
• Mitch Jackson, Director of Environmental Affairs and Sustainability, FedEx
• Valerie Smith, Vice President of Environmental Affairs, CitiGroup
In addition to public recognition, Faculty Pioneers receive an honorarium.
For more information about this awards program, visit: http://www.aspenCBE.org/.
Information on Award Winners
Lifetime Achievement
Thomas Donaldson
University of Pennsylvania
Thomas Donaldson is Mark O. Winkelman Professor at the Wharton School, where he has been repeatedly celebrated by his students as Outstanding Teacher of the Year. Dr. Donaldson has written prolifically and published broadly on business ethics, values and leadership and is considered a true trailblazer in these areas. He is the author of four books, translated into numerous languages, including Ties that Bind: A Social Contract Approach to Business Ethics (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), which was the winner of the 2005 Academy of Management Best Book Award in the Social Issues and Management division. He is a founding member and past president of the Society for Business Ethics.
Dr. Donaldson is a respected voice in both the corporate and public sectors. As an elected member of the National Adjudicatory Council of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, in 2002 he testified before the U.S. Senate regarding the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform legislation. In 2006 he delivered an address to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan, regarding the United Nations’ reform initiatives. Dr. Donaldson was named the most influential “thought leader” in Ethisphere Magazine’s 2007 ranking of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics. He serves as a trustee of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
His list of consulting clients is vast and his lecturing schedule takes him around the world many times over. Dr. Donaldson frequently appears on news shows and has been quoted in most major print media.
Faculty Pioneer
Gregory Fairchild
University of Virginia
An Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business, Dr. Fairchild teaches strategic management, entrepreneurship, leadership and ethics in MBA and executive education courses and has received several awards for teaching excellence.
His empirical and practical research attempts to answer challenging societal and economic questions about how firms create value, especially in traditionally overlooked settings. To that end, Dr. Fairchild has authored dozens of teaching cases that examine entrepreneurship and finance in underserved markets, both domestically and abroad. Dr. Fairchild is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. His work, Invisible Men and Women: Inner City Entrepreneurs and the Strategies they Employ to Survive and Grow, received the 2001 Business School Inner-city Leadership Conference Best Paper Award.
Dr. Fairchild’s current research interests include rural, inner-city, and minority-targeted private equity and the role of entrepreneurs as change agents vis-à-vis economic development. His research has been cited by such major media outlets as National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor. Some of the companies that have sought his advice include Google, Merrill Lynch, and Home Depot.
Faculty Pioneer
Michael Lenox
University of Virginia
Dr. Lenox is the Samuel L. Slover Professor of Business at the Darden School of Business, as well as Associate Dean and Executive Director of the School’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Additionally, he serves as the Faculty Director for the pan-university Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. Dr. Lenox has had a long-standing interest in the interface between business strategy and public policy, particularly in connection with the natural environment. His work draws upon emerging scholarship on the institutional, or non-market, strategies of firms and explores the prospects for industry self-regulation—both the incentives firms have to self-regulate and the institutions created by firms and other stakeholders to facilitate self-regulation. Dr. Lenox’s research has appeared in over 20 refereed academic publications and leading journals, and has been cited by such major media outlets as The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist.
Prior to joining Darden’s faculty in 2008, Dr. Lenox was a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, with a secondary appointment at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. There, he founded and served as faculty director of Duke’s Corporate Sustainability Initiative. In 2007, Dr. Lenox received Duke’s first Fuqua Footprints Faculty Award for bringing sustainability and social issues into the classroom.
Rising Star
Jay S. Golden
Arizona State University
An assistant professor in the School of Sustainability, Dr. Golden is committed to creating a new paradigm in higher education by developing curriculum that fosters multidisciplinary approaches to solving pressing sustainability imperatives for business and society. In addition to teaching such innovative courses as climate change adaptation and sustainable urban energy, he currently directs the school’s Certificate of Sustainable Technologies and Management program comprised of graduate MBA, engineering and sustainability students. Dr. Golden also founded and co-directs the summer Sustainable Energy Fellowship, a program that annually educates 40 of the nation’s most outstanding undergraduate business, engineering and physical science students on pressing energy and climate change challenges faced by business.
Dr. Golden’s research focuses on energy-climate system interactions both for infrastructure and consumer products. His well published theoretical and empirical results have provided a platform for the development of a more holistic approach to quantifying the sustainability of consumer products that accounts for all phases of a product’s life cycle. Dr. Golden’s research, and that of his Sustainability Consortium of leading researchers from eight universities, aims to develop the best system science and empirical tools for governments and businesses to adopt a unified and transparent sustainability index; this sustainability index is being implemented into supply chain decision-making by Wal-Mart. Dr. Golden has been invited to testify about his research before the U.S. Congress. He was also named an AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellow, has been appointed to a United Nations task force on life cycle management, and serves as an advisor on sustainability strategies for many multi-national corporations.
The Aspen Institute Center for Business Education seeks to create business leaders for the 21st century who are equipped with the vision and knowledge necessary to integrate corporate profitability with social value. To that end, Aspen CBE offers programs that provide business educators with the resources they need to incorporate issues of social and environmental stewardship into their teaching, research and curriculum development. As part of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program, Aspen CBE maintains close ties with over 150 MBA programs in 23 countries. Its websites draw over 75,000 visits monthly and its events and networks attract over 1,000 participants each year.
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