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CIBER GROW Connect – Fireside Chat & Networking
March 28 at 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm
The GROW Connect at Georgia State University is an annual gathering of leading business professionals and academic experts, fostering a thought-provoking dialogue on the evolving landscape of sustainability, ethics, and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) in international business.
This year, the symposium will explore the intersection of geopolitics, corporate sustainability, and accountability, examining how businesses navigate ethical challenges, regulatory shifts, and global market disruptions. A key objective is to explore how these dynamics influence corporate decision-making and sustainability efforts, while strengthening collaboration between industry and academia.
GUEST SPEAKERS:
Anu Piduru is the Senior Director of Sustainability at Carter’s, the largest branded marketer in North America of baby and children’s apparel. She leads Carter’s environmental sustainability strategy and also heads the company’s ESG reporting efforts. Over the course of Anu’s nearly 20-year career, she has amassed sustainability and environmental compliance experience in the aviation and retail industries, including waste reduction and management and decarbonization. Prior to her role at Carter’s, she worked in sustainability and environmental compliance for Delta Air Lines for nearly 15 years. She has served her local community as a board member for organizations focused on water resource preservation and landfill diversion. She is currently on the board for Atlanta’s LiveThrive organization, which owns and operates the Centers for Hard to Recycle Materials, and she serves on the Executive Committee for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s annual Light the Night walk in Atlanta. Anu earned her BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering and has been dedicated to the environment from a young age.
Jordan Siegel is a Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. Professor Siegel is also a Research Fellow at the William Davidson Institute and an Associate-in-Research at the Harvard Korea Institute of the Harvard Asia Center.
Professor Siegel specializes in the study of how companies gain competitive advantage through their global strategy. Professor Siegel finds that there are numerous opportunities for companies to attain superior sustainable corporate performance through creative strategies for corporate governance and human resource management.
A set of studies written by Professor Siegel explores how companies borrow, leverage, and arbitrage institutions across borders as a means of attaining long-term competitive advantage. By institutions Professor Siegel refers to the formal and informal rules of the game that affect companies’ competitive behavior and resource access. Formal institutions include corporate, securities, and bankruptcy law; informal institutions include a society’s cultural stance toward meritocracy and egalitarianism. (While a thorough list of rules of the game might be near-infinite, Professor Siegel concentrates on those that directly affect governance of companies.) The main idea is that companies—even single-country-focused companies—exhibit a surprising ability to attain competitive advantage via their choices of other countries’ institutions.
Another set of studies written by Professor Siegel and his coauthors shows that companies can make their approach to the labor market a core component of their competitive advantage. The goal has been to examine whether the hiring and promotion of female managers leads to improved corporate performance, whether foreign multinationals disproportionately engage in the hiring and promotion of female managers, and whether foreign multinationals act differently in the hiring and promotion of senior female managers in Japan and South Korea compared to what they do at home. Overall, the results show that foreign multinationals have been the most active in both Japan and South Korea in exploiting the social bias and hiring and promoting women to senior management positions. Professor Siegel and his coauthors argue based on panel analysis with company fixed effects, and based on systematically ruling out alternative explanations, that the aggressive application of this outsider’s advantage has led to demonstrable improvements in performance over time for foreign multinationals in Japan and South Korea. Moreover, this source of competitive advantage is not short-lived, but appears to be as much as a decade-long opportunity.
Professor Siegel’s work has been published in Management Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Comparative Economics, and the Journal of Economic Literature.
Sebastian Van Der Vegt is a global strategist and founding partner at WMBV Consulting, with over two decades of experience helping organizations expand across international markets. A former Coca-Cola executive and United Nations professional, he has led award-winning initiatives in sustainability, corporate communications, and brand strategy.
