| Biographical profile |
Kirk O. Hanson is a senior fellow of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and its executive director for seventeen years from 2001 to 2018. He was also the John Courtney Murray S.J. University Professor of Social Ethics. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics is one of the most active ethics centers in the United States, working in the fields of business, government, journalism, engineering, internet ethics, health care ethics, social sector ethics, leadership ethics, and K-12 character education. Hanson coordinated the activities of over twenty-five staff members who worked directly for the Center and seventy affiliated faculty scholars who worked on all aspects of applied and professional ethics. During his term, the Center emerged as the largest university-based ethics center in the world.
On the Stanford Business School faculty from 1978 through 2001, Hanson was a pioneer in the study of business ethics and business responsibility. In 2001, he took early retirement from the Graduate School of Business, and is now an emeritus faculty member. He taught in Stanford’s MBA and Executive Programs throughout his career there, and was Faculty Director of the Sloan Master’s Program, Stanford’s master’s program for mid-career executives (now the Stanford MSx Program). While at the GSB, he also got to know John W. Gardner, who had a neighboring office in the Littlefield Center from 1989 to the mid- 1990s. Hanson twice chaired Stanford University’s Committee on Investment Responsibility, which advises the Stanford Board of Trustees on social investment issues.
As senior fellow at the Markkula Center, Hanson writes on managing the ethical and public behavior of corporations and their leaders. He co-edited a four-volume series released in 2006 entitled The Accountable Corporation. His research interests include the design of corporate ethics programs and the responsibilities of boards for the ethical culture of organizations. In the summer of 2020, he is launching a blog entitled “Kirk Hanson on Corporate Misconduct” and working on a book, Rotten: Why Corporate Misconduct Continues and What to Do About It.
He was the founding president of the Business Enterprise Trust, a national organization created to promote exemplary behavior in business organizations; the first Chairman of the Santa Clara County Political Ethics Commission; and a weekly columnist on workplace ethics for the San Jose Mercury News. Hanson serves on the boards of directors of the Skoll Community Fund and the Compassion Institute, on the Advisory Board of the Neely Center for Ethical Leadership at the University of Southern California, and was the founding chair of the Advisory Board of the Center for International Business Ethics in Beijing, China’s first center for the study of business ethics.
Hanson is a graduate of Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has held graduate fellowships and research appointments at the Yale Divinity School and the Harvard Business School. He was honored by the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education with a lifetime achievement award for contributions to business and society.
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