Susanne Stormer as Adjunct Professor at cbsCSR and ICM

Monday 8 April, cbsCSR and ICM inaugurated Vice President of Corporate Sustainability at Novo Nordisk, Susanne Stormer as Adjunct Professor. She was welcomed to CBS by the President of CBS, Per Holten-Andersen and Head of Department of ICM and CBS Vice President for International Affairs, Dorte Salskov-Iversen. They both stated what a great honor it is for CBS to have Susanne Stormer as Adjunct Professor.

Susanne Stormer started her inaugural lecture, entitled “Reflections from a Learning Journey”, by telling the audience that by sharing her experiences and learning from her professional life, she hoped to inspire people to write academic papers or take action with an impact for “the real world”. She described how she had not had a clear cut career plan, but how the choices she had made through her choice of education and jobs, retrospectively, had led her in the direction of her current job – from starting her professional life as Research Assistant at the Tokai University European Center in Japan to her current job as Vice President of Corporate Sustainability at Novo Nordisk.

She spoke about how the writings of Jürgen Habermas and his world of critical theory had inspired her, and how she armed with his thoughts started as a teaching assistant at CBS in 1995 and continued to be associated with CBS, both as a lecturer and as an associate professor, up until 2006. She then said that she was happy to be back at CBS and encouraged old and new friends to contact her.

She used Novo Nordisk and their current focus areas to show case the important challenges and facilitators in the current world. Novo Nordisk has developed three platforms from which Novo Nordisk pursues opportunities to rethink how they do business.

The first one is titled “Healthy people – healthy planet”, and it is about how climate change and obesity share the same root causes and how efforts at reducing emissions or losing weight end up being drops in the ocean. A mind shift is therefore needed to get the world back in balance. She then talked about the preventive approach, which is at the heart of the next platform “Next generation”. It focuses on women as change agents and children as carriers of the key to a prosperous future. “Sustainable capitalism‟, the third platform, is a conversation taking place in business circles, kicked-off by the blatant failure of capital markets as we knew them.

Susanne Stormer finished her inaugural lecture by saying that the role of business in society is undergoing dramatic change and that the purpose of the corporation needs to be redefined. An idea she would work for, both at Novo Nordisk and now also at cbsCSR and ICM.