2011-12 Lecture

Kenman Wong, Ph.D.

Monday, Oct. 24, 2011 
7:30 p.m.
Stretansky Concert Hall
Cunningham Center for Music

Kenman Wong (Ph.D., University of Southern California) serves as a faculty member at Seattle Pacific University’s School of Business and Economics where he teaches courses in business ethics, microfinance, and business and global poverty.

Wong also provides leadership for co-curricular programs focused on market-oriented solutions to global poverty. In this capacity, he has served as co-chair of two innovative conferences: Bottom Billions/ Bottom Line: The Role of Business in Ending Poverty (April, 2011) and the Pacific Northwest Microfinance Conference (May, 2009).

Wong is the author of several books including Medicine and The Marketplace (Notre Dame University Press, 1999) and most recently, with Scott Rae, Business for the Common Good: A Christian Vision for the Marketplace (IVP Academic, 2011).

Prior to becoming a professor, he was employed with the technology and management consulting firm, Accenture (then known as Andersen Consulting). He lives in Seattle with his wife and three children.

In his lecture, “Bottom Lines for the Bottom Billions: The Role(s) of Business in Ending Poverty,” Wong will discuss how profit-generating organizations of various structures, sizes and across many industries can work to address this pressing problem.

He will begin with an exploration of the appropriate moral purposes and responsibilities of business. After offering an answer to this question, he will then present a case for why and how business can be a proactive partner in the creation of both economic and social value for people living at the bottom of the global economic ladder.