June 19, 2025 Speaker Topic Details and Bios

June 19, 2025 Presentation Topic Details: Catalyzing a New Economy that Works for Everyone and the Planet

For the past four decades, the dominant mythos of capitalism has been simple: maximize profits and value for shareholders and the market will take care of everything else. But today, we live in a different world. AI and automation are reshaping the workforce. Public trust in institutions is on the decline. Climate change is disrupting supply chains and threatening the viability of entire sectors. Communities and people are struggling with rising economic insecurity. Our economic system as we know it appears inadequate to handle these multiple complexities at a time when innovation is needed more than ever.  

We live in truly transformational times. The question is: How do we build a new economy that enables everyone to lead meaningful, vibrant lives? We believe the world’s mid-sized, privately held companies, which account for the lion’s share of economic activity and job creation, can be the transformational force we need if their leaders’ voices can be collectively harnessed. With the freedom to think and act beyond quarterly earnings, such companies have a rare and urgent opportunity to reimagine our economic system. We have launched a new initiative called “Internality” designed specifically to amplify their voices and catalyze this transformation.

Fred Keller

Fred Keller founded Cascade Engineering in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1973. Cascade has been widely studied and lauded for their programs that support employees and the environment including Welfare to Career, Returning Citizens Anti-Racism and zero Waste. Cascade has received many honors including the Ron Brown Award for Corporate Leadership from the White House in 1999 and the Distinguished Service to the State of Michigan by the National Governors Association in 2004. Fred believes that business has the unique opportunity to complement its efforts on financial performance with important work in the social and environmental arenas. He has emphasized the key role business can play in building financial, social and ecological capital, often through partnerships with government and community agencies

Fred served 17 years as Sr. Visiting lecturer at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and is an Emeritus Executive-in-Residence at the Center for Positive Organizations at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He was chair of the U.S. Department of Commerce Manufacturing Council and is a past chair and member of the Board of Trustees for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Fred has served on many community boards including being the co-founder and Chair of Talent First – a CEO led change process for West Michigan and emeritus advisor for the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. Fred’s education includes the BS in Materials Science and Engineering from Cornell and MS in Business Management from RPI.

Stuart Hart

Stuart L. Hart is Professor in Residence at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. He was the founder of the Erb Institute’s dual master’s program in the early 1990s and then went on to hold faculty positions and launch centers for sustainable business at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management, where he is S.C. Johnson Professor Emeritus. Most recently, Hart was Professor and Steven Grossman Endowed Chair in Sustainable Business at the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business where he was co-founder and director of the school’s new Sustainable Innovation MBA Program and still serves as Distinguished Fellow.

Hart is one of the world’s top authorities on the implications of environment and poverty for business strategy having published more than 100 papers and authored or edited nine books with over 60,000 Google Scholar citations.  His article “Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World” won the McKinsey Award for Best Article in the Harvard Business Review for 1997 and helped launch the movement for corporate sustainability.  With C.K. Prahalad, Hart also wrote the path-breaking 2002 article “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which provided the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the four billion poor in the developing world. His best-selling book, Capitalism at the Crossroads, published in 2005 was selected by Cambridge University as one of the top 50 books on sustainability of all-time; the third edition of the book was published in 2010. His new book, Beyond Shareholder Primacy: Remaking Capitalism for a Sustainable Future, was published by Stanford Business Books in April 2024.