Robert Kinloch Massie has been working on business, finance, governance, sustainability, and social entrepreneurship for more than thirty years. Dr. Massie received his A.B. magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1978 and his master’s degree in social and theological ethics from Yale Divinity School in 1982.
Massie received his doctorate in business policy and corporate strategy from Harvard Business School in 1989. From 1989 to 1996 he taught at Harvard Divinity School where he ran the Project on Business, Values and the Economy. In 1993, as a senior Fulbright Scholar, he served on the faculty of the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. His definitive history of the U.S. anti-apartheid movement — Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years — was published in 1998 by Doubleday. It received the Lionel Gelber Prize, the largest non-fiction prize in the world, given for the best book in English on foreign relations. In 1994 Massie won the statewide Democratic primary to become his party’s nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts.
From 1996 to 2003, Massie served as the executive director of Ceres, the largest coalition of institutional investors and environmental and public interest groups in the United States. In 1997 he proposed the creation of generally accepted guidelines for corporate sustainability performance, and from 1998 to 2005 he was the co-founder and first chair of the Global Reporting Initiative. The GRI is now an independent international standard setting body based in Amsterdam whose disclosure guidelines are used by more than 1,800 multinational corporations. In 2002 Massie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the field of finance by CFO magazine.
In 2002 he conceived of the first Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk at United Nations headquarters, which led in 2003 to the formation to the Investor Network on Climate Risk. INCR is an active alliance of 50 U.S. pension funds worth more than $5 trillion who have moved dozens of major utilities, insurance companies, investment banks, and other key industries to assess the financial costs of climate change. He is also founder and coordinator of the Consultation and Sustainability and Transparency in the United States (COST-US), a network of national investment leaders and experts.
His leadership has been described in many books on innovation and social entrepreneurship and he has received numerous citations and prizes, including the 2008 Boryana Damyanova Social Responsibility Award from the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. In April 2009 he received both the Bavaria Impact Award and the Bavaria Innovation Award for his transformative work on capital markets. Named after the late investment visionary Joan Bavaria, these awards are normally given to separate individuals or organizations.
For the last few years, Massie’s professional activity was reduced because of hepatitis C related liver cirrhosis. In July 2009, however, he received a liver transplant, which has put him on the path to complete recovery. Since the fall of 2009 he has been be a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.
