Corporations’ futures are in jeopardy unless the STEM crisis is solved

Less than half of high school graduates are ready for college-level math and less than a third are ready for college-level science in the United States, according to the ACT’s Condition of College & Career Readiness report. The United States is clearly falling short in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education needed to produce the world-class talent that will be critical to fulfilling the requirements of the 21st-century workforce.

Revitalizing STEM education and increasing the number of students who choose STEM majors and careers is imperative for the future of the advanced manufacturing industry in the United States. Dow, like other companies dependent on a workforce proficient in science, technology, engineering, and math, has a responsibility to use our credibility, capabilities, and resources to make students, the workforce, and the economy stronger. Read the rest of this entry »

Four weeks is both a very long time and a blip when your world flips upside down. In May of this year, four of us from FedEx joined a team from IBM in Salvador, the largest city on the northeast coast of Brazil. With the support of IBM and CDC Development Solutions, an organization that designs and manages international corporate volunteerism programs for companies such as FedEx and IBM, we tested the concept of an International Corporate Volunteer program for developing FedEx’s future leaders and determined the best approach was to launch a similar program. For me, it was the experience of a lifetime – to live and enjoy the unique culture of the area, to work with passionate people on their mission to raise people out of poverty, and to interact with some of the great talent within IBM and FedEx. And the self-awareness that came with it has truly changed me in ways both deep and permanent. Read the rest of this entry »

Center member Tyco International has found a way to fully utilize its people, products, services, and funding support in a new philanthropic global partnership with Action Against Hunger / ACF International. Together they have formed the Clean Water Access Initiative, which will bring safe drinking water to some of the most vulnerable communities around the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Publix Super Markets earned the No. 1 spot followed by Google and UPS in the 2011 ranking of the 50 companies with the best corporate citizenship reputations among the U.S. public as compiled by the Center for Corporate Citizenship and Reputation Institute.

The Corporate Social Responsibility Index (CSR Index) was developed by researchers at the Center in conjunction with the Reputation Institute to understand how companies’ reputations are affected by public perceptions of performance related to citizenship (the community and the environment), governance (ethics and transparency) and workplace practices. Rankings in the 2011 CSR Index are based on a survey conducted in January 2011 of 7,790 online consumers in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

While in New York recently, I encountered firsthand the early stages of the protest occupation of Wall Street. The protest against “the 1 percent” who have the most is conducted on behalf of “the 99 percent” who have less and less. OccupyWallStreet.org is an ostensibly leaderless movement that seems to have been conceived by the nonprofit creative collective, Adbusters. The one thing participants claim to have in common is that they “are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”

Among the images that present the contrasts between these percentages, one of the most widely reported was of the group of affluent citizens attending a cocktail party on the balcony of the legendarily exclusive Cipriani’s during the first week of the protest (now into its third week). Attendees were filmed sipping champagne, looking down on the thousands of protesters, and even snapping photos of the throng with their smartphones. That moment has been compared in the press to the Roman circuses and the comparison is sobering given how apt the analogy seems and how the Roman era ended. Read the rest of this entry »