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Nohria Speaks at First Niswarth Conference on Social Change

Corporate social responsibility is both ethical and financially beneficial for businesses, argued Nitin Nohria, the Dean of Harvard Business School and keynote speaker of last week’s Business of Social Change conference on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Raj Mundra, founder and head of Niswarth, an Andover service learning program in India, organized the conference around social change last Sunday, featuring student, alumni and instructors as panelists. Nohria focused on the role of business in instrumenting social change in his keynote speech. The public’s general distrust of businesses is concerning but expected, he said, given the recent economic downturn. This public distrust is worrying because businesses play a key role in improving society. Nohria gave an anecdote from his childhood, in which the opening of a factory brought crucial infrastructure, employment and educational and health facilities to a village community. Nohria compared the relative powerlessness of government intervention in preventing poverty. On the other hand, he explained, 75 percent of the world’s wealth is controlled by the top 1000 companies, giving corporations enormous power to potentially combat social inequities. He said, “We will never be able to solve the problem of getting people in the world, for example, educated, by thinking that we will give them free education through governments. We will never be able to feed everybody in the world if we believe that what we are going to do is have governments feed them. It is an unsustainable wrong; it just cannot get done.” Fortunately, Nohria said, many companies are slowly realizing that social responsibility is the linchpin of a successful business. 40 percent of the world’s arable land is unusable, and food prices are predicted to rise in the next decade. Many companies are therefore becoming more conscious of the world’s limited resources, and making efforts to reduce their carbon footprint and their negative effects on the environment, according to Nohria. Nohria also pointed out that business principles are imperative to making non-profit companies sustainable. Akshaya Patra, a non-profit that gives free midday meals to approximately 1.3 million children in schools every day, reduced the cost of a meal to 20 cents as a result of applying core business principles such as high efficiency and waste-reduction. “Business is not just designed to help people who are already rich make more money. It’s actually a set of ideas, it’s a set of principles, that can allow the delivery of goods and services that many other people care about,” he said. After the conference Mundra said, “Mr. Nohria, who is a current parent, was very gracious in coming and spending the entire time with us, and so I thought his messages were really powerful about business… His reflections on innovations and interdisciplinary work and the relevance of what Harvard Business School does to the real world—I think it made all of us think about the relevance of an Andover education.”