Chip Pitts Quotes

United States, Lecturer
November 24, 1960

Chip Pitts is a lecturer who has regularly taught at Stanford, Oxford, and as a Professor or Visiting Professor at other major universities in the West and Asia. Considered one of the world’s “top academics on corporate responsibility,” his teaching includes leadership, global governance, business and human rights, sustainability, and ethical globalization. Advisor to the UN Global Compact, he has led the Compact’s Good Practice Note project since its inception. Currently a board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, he has also been a board leader (among others) of Bonn-based Fairtrade International, former President and Chair of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and former Chair of Amnesty International USA.

Genuine leadership is inherently moral. So the values chosen matter tremendously, and they must be values aligned with society (including the most universal statement of human values in history, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as clear values of sustainability evidenced in global declarations like the Stockholm and Rio Declarations.

Chip Pitts
- Moral
- Chosen
- Declaration
The October Crisis was not just a crisis of the financial sector, but one arising from an ill-informed and erroneous mindset that still infects businesses in general and requires correction.

Chip Pitts
- Financial
- Crisis
- Mindset

Genuine leadership is inherently moral.

Chip Pitts
- Moral
The ultimate cause of the October Crisis was the ideological embrace of Milton Friedman's warped but still dominant view that "the only social responsibility of business is to make a profit for its shareholders," and until that socially and economically counterproductive - and empirically, legally and ethically inaccurate - view is corrected, we will continue to have the increasing and more intense crises of global capitalism that we have seen recur with ever greater frequency over the past forty years. Sadly but clearly, the lessons have still not been learned.

Chip Pitts
One fascinating development in recent years is how large companies like Wal-Mart or the major apparel brands are dramatically influencing behavior throughout their supply chains by requiring CSR compliance as a condition of being a supplier.

Chip Pitts
- Influence
- Behavior