Events

Past Event

Sustainability Speaker Series: The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist with Christine Bader

October 23, 2014
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Event time is displayed in your time zone.
Columbia University Morningside Campus, Havemeyer, Room 309

CCSI and The Earth Institute’s Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development and MS in Sustainability Management Program, hosted the Sustainability Speaker Series: The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist, a book talk with Christine Bader.

Christine Bader is a sought-after speaker and advisor on corporate responsibility and a visiting scholar at Columbia University. Her work with BP from 1999 until 2008 brought her to Indonesia, China, and the U.K., managing the social impacts of major company projects in the developing world. She has published in numerous outlets and given talks around the world, including a TEDx talk entitled “Manifesto for the Corporate Idealist.” A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she holds a BA from Amherst College and an MBA from Yale. She lives in her native New York City with her husband and two children.

About the Book: There is an invisible army of people deep inside the world’s biggest and best-known companies, pushing for safer and more responsible practices. They are trying to prevent the next Rana Plaza factory collapse and the next Deepwater Horizon explosion. Obviously, they don’t always succeed. Christine Bader was one of those people. She loved her employer, BP, and the work she did managing the social impacts of some of the company’s biggest projects in the developing world – until a string of fatal BP accidents happened, culminating in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Bader’s story of working deep inside the belly of the beast is unique in its details, but not in its themes: of feeling like an outsider both inside the company (accused of being a closet activist) and out (assumed to be a corporate shill), of getting mixed messages from senior management, and of being frustrated with corporate life but committed to pushing for change from within.

Copies of the book were available for purchase.

For further information regarding this event, please email Jessica Sotomayor at [email protected] .