Speakers List / Overview

Mr. Kramer is the co-founder and managing director of FSG and the author of influential publications on shared value, corporate social responsibility (CSR), catalytic philanthropy, strategic evaluation, impact investing and adaptive leadership.

Mr. Kramer oversees FSG’s consulting practice and helps drive the vision and growth of the firm. He has led consulting engagements across all of FSG’s impact areas, with particular emphasis on philanthropic strategy for private and community foundations, CSR, evaluation and impact investing. He also leads the research on many of FSG’s publications and publishes regularly in Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and is the co-author of the book Do More Than Give.

He is a frequent speaker around the world on topics in catalytic philanthropy, collective impact, creating shared value for corporations, new approaches to evaluation and shared measurement, impact investing, social entrepreneurship and adaptive leadership.

Before co-founding FSG, Mr. Kramer served for 12 years as president of Kramer Capital Management, a venture capital firm, and before that as an associate at the law firm of Ropes & Gray in Boston, and as a law clerk to Judge Alvin B. Rubin, Fifth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals.

After earning his B.A. (summa cum laude) and M.B.A. at Brandeis University and University of Pennsylvania, respectively, he went on to achieve his J.D. (magna cum laude) at the University of Pennsylvania Law School

Creating Shared Value:
Redefining the Role of Business in Society 
In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies remain trapped in an outdated approach that views value creation narrowly, optimizing short-term financial performance in a bubble while ignoring the broader influences that determine their longer-term success. The alternative is to embrace the concept of shared value: creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges.
 
Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success that can give rise to the next major transformation of business thinking and drive a new wave of innovation and productivity growth in the global economy.  A growing number of companies around the world have already embarked on important efforts to create shared value by reconceiving products and markets, redefining productivity in the value chain, and enabling local cluster development.
 
Businesses acting as businesses, not as charitable donors, are the most powerful force for addressing the pressing societal issues we face. Shared value not only redefines the role of business in society, it leads to new and heightened forms of more effective cross-sector collaborations with government and civil society.