Dr. William New Shares Lessons Learned by a Seasoned Social Entrepreneur
Friday June 8, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
William New has pursued a career as physician, engineer, educator and serial entrepreneur that began with a successful boyhood business repairing neighborhood black-and-white televisions on a risk-free “no fix, no pay” basis. He later designed and marketed coffee cup warmers, smart septic tanks, and eventually medical electronics with two Silicon Valley IPOs.
He savored the triumph but later regretted the perils of venture capital and Wall Street in building companies across the US, Canada and the UK.
Bill’s consistent goal was to create and nurture customer-centric sustainable enterprises. He shares these experiences with the hope that young social entrepreneurs forearmed can build sustainable companies that put people before profit, work over wealth, substance above spectacle, and cultivate happiness not hedonism.
Bill will lead a conversational Q&A session about this and other lessons learned over many years as a successful social entrepreneur, and propose strategies to create sustainable organizations that avoid self-destructive money-obsessed consumption to prosper instead, with longevity, health, and happiness exemplified in other developed economies.
Dr. New retired from Stanford University after 25 years of faculty service, but continues biotech research supporting commercial spin-outs as adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. He earned BS and MS degrees in engineering at Stanford, his MD at Duke University, a PhD at UCLA, and an MBA at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
A board director of numerous companies, non-profits, schools and universities, he currently serves as a trustee of nearby Putney School.
For 40 years he has nurtured a rural homestead in the hills above Palo Alto, CA, which is designed for self-reliant sustainability using water recycling, wood heat, worm composting, and solar energy, where he raises organic gardens, honey bees, occasional goats, and free-range chickens, accompanied by a long line of loyal retrievers and smart poodles.
A networking social with refreshments will start at 5:30 p.m., with Dr. New’s presentation beginning at 6:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Bill suggests reviewing the following before his presentation, if possible:
CEO/founder Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to potential future shareholders on his change-the-world goals
Jeremy Grantham Discusses Investing, Resource Limitations & Global Warming
Friday December 2, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Jeremy Grantham, founder of GMO, a global investment management firm responsible for over 
$93 billion in client assets, will speak at Marlboro College Graduate School on “Irrational Avoidance of the Unpleasant: Perspectives on Investing, Resource Limitations & Global Warming”.
A recent New York Times profile of Grantham says his quarterly letters “command a cult following of readers within and beyond the financial industry, (because they) inspire even the most short-term profit-minded investors to do a little fate-of-the-world-scale thinking.”
Grantham is an impassioned environmentalist who channels his wealth to The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, which tries to raise public awareness of environmental issues and to promote collaboration within the environmental movement. He also supports the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Reporting, which awards the $75,000 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Environmental Journalism.
Grantham has been featured in Forbes, Barron’s and Business Week and is routinely quoted by the financial press. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Sheffield (U.K.) and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Reading Grantham’s latest quarterly letter, you get a glimpse of his ability to intertwine compelling storytelling with well documented research. He includes a tale of “The Devil and the Farmer” which highlights his interest in soil erosion and sustainable agriculture. Jeremy Grantham’s son, Rupert, who is a MBA candidate in the Marlboro MBA in Managing for Sustainability, is completing his Capstone on “Promoting Sustainable Agriculture“, a project sponsored by the Grantham Foundation.
Robert Repetto Discusses America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward
Friday November 11, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Marlboro College Graduate School will host a free, public presentation by Robert Repetto, a senior fellow in the Climate and Energy Program at the United Nations Foundation, and a member of the Circle of Advisors for the Marlboro MBA.
Repetto has worked at senior levels in universities and in Washington for over 25 years, to develop and promote reasonable responses to the challenges of climate change. His talk will lay out those challenges and how they can best be met and overcome.
Repetto’s book, America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward was published this year.
Peter Kinder Discusses Artificial Animal: Society, Government and Corporations
Friday, October 14, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
With the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the U.S. Constitution guarantees corporations the right to participate in elections, the rights of corporations as individuals has again become a hot issue. But debating “corporate personhood” obscures the ultimate question the court has raised: what is a corporation? History holds some surprising answers; it also suggests paths to change. Peter Kinder has studied the relationship between society and corporations for 40 years and is former president and co-founder of KLD Research & Analytics, a company that researches corporate behavior for socially responsible investors. He now blogs on the subject—and many others—at TheBell.us.
William Hsiao Discusses Healthcare reform and economic vitality in Vermont
Friday September 16, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Dr. William Hsiao, K.T. Li Professor of Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health, will speak on healthcare reform and the long-term economic health and vitality of Vermont, following his work for the Vermont legislature to develop a model for a single-payer healthcare system for the state. He will discuss the link between improvements in the healthcare system and the potential for just and sustainable economic development. Dr. Hsiao has helped research and design healthcare systems for seven countries and is currently working with universities in China to conduct a nation-wide study on healthcare financing for 100 million poor Chinese.
View Dr. Hsiao’s September 16 presentation. This is the full presentation, with talk highlights collected at the beginning.
The Commons article about Dr. Hsiao’s talk: “Better Healthcare Access Helps Economy Grow”
