Kellie McElhaney is the Margo N. Alexander Faculty Fellow in Corporate Responsibility and the founding Executive Director of the Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She developed and launched this new center in 2003, which has helped place corporate responsibility squarely as one of the core competencies and competitive advantages of the Haas School. The Wall Street Journal ranked Haas as the number two business school in the country for corporate social responsibility (CSR) in 2006. Professor McElhaney teaches courses on Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility, which include in-depth, experiential consulting engagements with companies on high-visibility strategic CSR challenges, in all of the MBA degree programs at Haas. She also teaches extensive Executive Education in this area.
Dr. McElhaney was named a Faculty Pioneer for leading institutional change by the Aspen Institute in 2005, hailing her as one of the world's leading thinkers on strategic CSR. Her research focus is in three areas: Analyzing and developing companies' CSR strategies, and their alignment with core business objectives, core competencies, and business value; exploring the linkage between gender and CSR and using CSR as a hook to re-engage women with business as employees, business leaders, consumers, entrepreneurs, and investors; and the business value and opportunities in branding, communication and CSR, on which she is currently under contract and writing a book which will be complete in 2007.
Kellie consults to several Fortune 500 companies in developing integrated CSR strategy, bridging her academic focus with the practitioner world. Her client list includes HP, Gap, eBay, McDonalds, Ernst & Young, Driscoll's Berries, Nokia, Navigant, Volunteer Match, Ford Motor Company, Bernard Hodes Group, and Triage Consulting Group. She is a highly engaging and motivational public speaker in the area of CSR, and has keynoted at major conferences, leadership summits, and corporate events on the topic.
