I hope that the Sunday New York Times Magazine gets read by all the Gen-Yers of our country, both male and female. The lead article by Nick Kristof addresses the paramount moral challenge of the 21st century. As Kristof writes, the challenge of the 18th century was slavery and the 20th century was totalitarianism.
In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape. Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitcal sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. "Women hold up half the sky," in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that's mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it not an accident that those same countries are disproprotionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. . . . That's why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren't the problem: they're the solution.
As you consider your roles in corporate America, recognize that the pendulum is swinging back to a model in which corporations will be regarded more as social organizations with obligations beyond Wall Street. As Rakesh Khurana, prof at Harvard Business School says, "The narrative for coporate America has changed. " Business has become a partner with the community.