The CEO Initiative wrapped last night. It was an extraordinary opportunity to support chief executives as they wrangled with the pressures of CEO activism, and the nuts and bolts of building more inclusive and innovative companies while creating healthier and more productive communities.
We also ended on a powerful high note, with a call to action for everyone in the room to expand their visions to include the very poor, and to reimagine a world shaped by justice.
I’ll let my colleague, Matt Heimer, take it from here:
At an event where business leaders devoted hours to discussing how they could lead with purpose, the last word went to an activist for whom purposeful action is often, literally, a matter of life and death. Occupying the closing speaker’s slot at Fortune‘s CEO Initiative in San Francisco on Tuesday, Bryan Stevenson, the law professor, anti-death-penalty advocate and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, called on a rapt crowd of executives to “find ways to get proximate to the poor and vulnerable,” the better to solve social problems.
“Many of us have been taught that if there’s a bad part of town, you don’t put your business there,” Stevenson said. “But I am persuaded that we need to do the opposite. We need to engage and invest and position ourselves in the places where there is despair.”
At an event where business leaders devoted hours to discussing how they could lead with purpose, the last word went to an activist for whom purposeful action is often, literally, a matter of life and death. Occupying the closing speaker’s slot at Fortune‘s CEO Initiative in San Francisco on Tuesday, Bryan Stevenson, the law professor, anti-death-penalty advocate and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, called on a rapt crowd of executives to “find ways to get proximate to the poor and vulnerable,” the better to solve social problems.
“Many of us have been taught that if there’s a bad part of town, you don’t put your business there,” Stevenson said. “But I am persuaded that we need to do the opposite. We need to engage and invest and position ourselves in the places where there is despair.”
Click through for a video snippet, and I’ll be sure to let you all know when the full video is posted.
Thanks to all for following the CEOI via Twitter and live stream, we appreciate you. Tomorrow we resume our regularly scheduled raceAhead programming.