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April 2007
 Corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the world, and with that power comes responsibility and obligation.
This was the recurring theme throughout the keynote remarks given by Ernst & Young's Beth Brooke at The Center's 2007 International Corporate Citizenship Conference.
"Our companies have unique skills and competencies and an economic platform that allows them to wield significant power," said Brooke. "If you think of your particular organization as an economy, with economic power to force policy changes and to drive values changes, it's really powerful. Our companies are engines of change — economic change, social change, policy change. And we have an obligation to use that power to make a positive difference in our society and in our business context."
Brooke knows about power. Ernst and Young is a $20 billion global company with 114,000 people in 140 countries around the world. As Global Vice Chair of Strategy, Communications & Regulatory Affairs, Brooke is one of the company's most senior leaders, and was recently named by Forbes magazine as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world.
And she also knows about corporate citizenship, which she says used to be her night job, but has now been integrated into everything she does.
"I've been with the firm for 26 years, except for a brief exodus in the Clinton administration. Early in my career, I couldn't figure out how I was making a difference, and it was really frustrating. All of my making-a-difference activities were in my night job. But today, because Ernst & Young now understands that what we do matters and we have a huge platform to make a difference, my night job and my day job are the exact same job, and I can't tell the difference anymore. Because we've embedded our corporate citizenship into our strategy."
What we accomplish, not what we do
"At Ernst & Young, we think in terms of what we accomplish as an organization, not what we do, which helps our people to see that we're into something much bigger with a much higher purpose," explained Brooke.
Ernst & Young focuses its energies on three themes:
- Developing the people of tomorrow:
"Many of our employees go on to be CFOs, CEOs, regulators, financial leaders in the world's capital markets. We're creating a base of people that will hopefully take our value system into the financial markets and strengthen them around the world."
- Serving the companies and markets of tomorrow:
"Providing our services to the largest global companies around the world today is all fine and good, but when we think about what we accomplish, we think more about serving the future companies, serving the entrepreneurs that are going to be the global leaders of tomorrow, working in the emerging markets to help them strengthen their regulatory regimes, so that they will grow to be strong countries of tomorrow with strong economies."
- Strengthening the communities of tomorrow:
"If our people all over the world devote their energies to doing good in their communities and taking our financial competencies to help nonprofit organizations run their organizations better, then we strengthen the communities of tomorrow."
Ernst & Young has brought these strengths to two major issues: education and entrepreneurship.
Education
 Ernst & Young is committed to education as a way to offset income inequality and the resultant inequality of opportunity. Brooke cited examples of some of their community engagement activities in this area, including a 15-year mentoring program at a Bronx high school considered one of the worst performing schools in the country; the company's work to improve 12 schools in South Africa; a unique computer-aided learning course developed in India that is now being expanded and rolled out across the entire country; the company's sponsorship of the PBS children’s television series, CYBERCHASE, which teaches kids aged 8-12 math concepts in a fun and understandable way.
But, Brooke asserted, while these community engagement activities are necessary and nice to do, they are not sufficient.
"We're also focusing on the bigger problems in education," said Brooke. "One thing that is very clear is that educational access is a problem. A lack of financial preparedness is keeping children from attaining all that they can be and realizing their potential. So we're working to create an educational access program to break down the barriers, to find the barriers around planning for and affording school. Our goal is to improve financial readiness. We're looking at mentoring students and parents to demystify the financial aid process for them, to help families actually fill out financial aid packages, and to provide individualized assistance for students and their parents around financial aid, financial questions, and tax questions."
But to make an impact on the issue, companies must work together, said Brooke. "There is so much power if we could figure out how to use our unique skills and competencies to actually work together to make a difference in the educational system, and I think that's going to be the next huge challenge for the group in this room is to figure out."
To jumpstart that effort, Ernst & Young is convening a webcast on May 2 titled, “Best in Class: How Top Corporations Can Help Transform Public Education," which will include panelists from GE and IBM. (To learn more about the webcast, click here.)
Entrepreneurship
Ernst & Young also believes that entrepreneurship is an engine for economic growth, and actively seeks and celebrates entrepreneurial leaders and visionaries. The company's Entrepreneur of the Year Award, held in many cities across the U.S. and 40 countries around the world, began 20 years ago. In more recent years, Ernst & Young has created other awards celebrating entrepreneurship, including the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the Youth Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Another program promoting the entrepreneur spirit is the Corporate Social Responsibility Fellows program, in which Ernst & Young employees are deployed on three-month assignments within the U.S., Canada, and Central and South America on projects specifically designed to improve the integrity and effectiveness of the entrepreneurs’ key business processes.
"It catalyzes our own people's desires to make a difference, because they get to feel it and touch it hands on, early on," said Brooke. "It gives them a global mindset. They get to make a difference, and they come back with a true understanding of what our obligation is around corporate citizenship, and it's in them and it's there forever. And it forever changes them."
Brooke explained that the fellows program was an outgrowth of her own involvement with a group called TechnoServe, upon whose board she has sat for many years. TechnoServe's mission is to work with entrepreneurial men and women in poor rural areas of the developing world, helping them to build businesses that create income, opportunity and economic growth for their families, their communities and their countries.
Brooke recently visited Africa with TechnoServe, where she saw such entrepreneurship in action. "I saw the power of working with one couple in Meru, Kenya, who had grown beans for the last decade and the price of beans had fallen and they weren't making a living. They were living in poverty on less than a dollar a day, working their hearts out."
TechnoServe helped them convert their failing bean farm into a productive and profitable banana farm instead. That couple then went on to work with 12,000 farmers in Meru, Kenya, and helped them convert all their farms to grow bananas. These farmers have joined together into a cooperative, giving them the volume to sell to the market at better prices.
But the story gets even better, said Brooke. These farmers are also working together to use their profits to build a medical clinic in Meru.
"We go to see the medical clinic, and what we saw is this great piece of land and the outline for the medical clinic, the foundation, two layers of bricks up. They're building it brick by brick, and when they make enough money from the cooperative, they buy another brick. So it's going to take them a while, but they're so excited.
"You don't have to talk to these people about corporate responsibility and corporate citizenship. They get immediately how you have to give back to the community once you make a profit."
It must be embedded
Brooke predicts that, over time, corporate citizenship will become even more deeply blended into the business strategy.
The global corporation is emerging as a social construct, she explained. As governments struggle to provide the needs of individuals within their countries, individuals will increasingly look to their corporate entities for provision of services, for social attachment, for education.
"That's an obligation we have to recognize. Companies that step up to that expanded global challenge are going to enjoy an enormous competitive advantage. All of us are going to get dragged there, but the ones that get there early are probably going to have an advantage.
"I think we need to challenge, what's the obligation in the energy sector? What's the obligation in the technology sector, in the financial sector? What's your obligation? And what's our obligation?
"We are witnessing a significant shift in that stakeholder expectations on a business will drive companies and drive CEOs to pay attention to their expectations," said Brooke. "CSR cannot be separate and distinct. It has to be our business and it's not a nice to have."
"Leadership in the 21st century isn't going to look like leadership in the 20th century. Those that are asking and answering those questions differently are where the real emerging leaders are going to come from."
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