Judith Rodin, Rockefeller Foundation CEO: 'Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch'

Judith Rodin, CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation.

In a recent interview with Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin, we discussed the Foundation’s upcoming 100-year anniversary and the evolution of the philanthropic sector, the role of innovation in achieving human progress, leadership lessons in effecting large-scale change, the 21^st century demand for collaboration across sectors, and much more.

The year 2013 marks one hundred years since John D. Rockefeller established The Rockefeller Foundation. To commemorate the occasion, the Foundation is launching a Centennial initiative that will celebrate the richness of their past work and look ahead to the development of innovative approaches to address the global shocks and deepening stresses of the 21^st century.  The Foundation views its Centennial as an unprecedented opportunity to raise the effectiveness of their work and find solutions to global challenges. To achieve this, the Foundation is hosting convenings throughout the world that focus on a number of global imperatives, publishing a series of books that draw on their past to provide lessons for philanthropy in the future, and engaging with people through new digital platforms to encourage discussion on a variety of different issues and allow people to participate in the Centennial from all over the world.

The first event in their Centennial series took place last week in Washington on the topic of building social, economic and environmental resilience. More information about that event including video streaming of the panels can be found here.

Judith Rodin is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s leading philanthropic organizations.  Prior to the Rockefeller Foundation, she was the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and provost of Yale University.  She was the first woman named to lead an Ivy League Institution and is the first woman to serve as the Rockefeller Foundation’s president in its nearly 100-year history.  Since joining the Foundation in 2005, Dr. Rodin has recalibrated its focus to meet the challenges of the 21st century.  Today the Foundation supports and shapes innovations to strengthen resilience to risks and ensure that more people have access to the benefits of globalization.  Dr. Rodin is the author of more than 200 academic articles and has written or co-written 12 books and has received over 16 honorary degrees and serves as a member of the board for several leading corporations and non-profits.  Dr. Rodin is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and earned her Ph D. in Psychology from Columbia University.

Rahim Kanani: As you think about the Rockefeller Foundation and its impact on the world over the last 100 years, how would you describe the evolution of philanthropy as a sector, and where has the Foundation pioneered efforts to lead the way in this regard?

Judith Rodin: The extraordinary genius of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie 100 years ago was their recognition that the great wealth they had amassed could be put to public good and used to solve the complex problems for which there were no other sources of capital.  This was the invention of modern American philanthropy as we know it.  The idea of systematizing giving to achieve human progress was the true innovation of John D. Rockefeller, and ultimately the Rockefeller Foundation’s legacy.

Philanthropy has experienced three distinct changes over the last 100 years.  In the first phase of American philanthropy, foundations were seeking to solve huge sweeping global social problems.  Diseases like Yellow Fever, hookworm and malaria were rampant, yet the basics of public health as we know it today were still unknown.  Foundations engaged partners and other institutions.    They were always envisioning, creating, and establishing new organizations that implemented, and operated towards, their strategy and goals.  This phase in Rockefeller’s history saw significant achievement – a Nobel-prize-winning vaccine for Yellow Fever, the professionalization of the field of public health, and the spread of western medicine in Africa, Asia and around the world.

The second phase of philanthropy came after the Second World War – following the establishment of the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods Doctrine.  With the creation of the World Bank and the IMF, large sources of capital and different mechanisms for setting common agendas and bringing about global collaboration were established.  Because this was a role historically fulfilled by Foundations like Rockefeller, there was a significant shift in the way Foundations began to think about solving social problems.  Philanthropy started to seek out and fund work through civil society organizations and the NGO sector was developed.  There was a real emphasis on how to create lasting opportunity for individuals and communities, not just how to fix disease or create food security.  As John D. Rockefeller said, “The world owes no man a living, but it owes everyman the opportunity to make a living.”  This phase of philanthropy resulted in the creation of the ‘social safety net’.  For The Rockefeller Foundation, this phase continued to be one of strategic growth and innovation – a time of betting on big and new ideas.  During this phase, the Foundation experienced powerful energetic moments.  Most significantly, during the 1960s and 70s, Norman Borlaug and other Rockefeller Foundation scientists developed rice and wheat varieties that saved a billion lives throughout Latin American and Asia – mobilizing the most significant agricultural revolution of our time.  Today, more than half of the people on earth eat rice and wheat varieties containing these genes.  This post-war era served to strengthen the foundations of development and gave rise to new ideas, new ways of leveraging research, and critical new alliances.

I think we are now in the third phase of philanthropy.  The world has fundamentally changed, and globalization is not only impacting the problems we are seeing, but also the way we work to address these challenges.  As a result, the Foundation seeks out innovations on the ground – sourcing ideas from the crowd – and looks to scale them as often as we look to create them.  Technology has given us unprecedented access to innovations, often from unlikely sources, allowing us to effect change in completely new ways.  We haven’t rejected the earlier phases of philanthropy, but with a new set of tools and approaches we can’t and we don’t rely on the old institutional way of working.  The Rockefeller Foundation’s current work aims to pioneer efforts to scale new innovations, from our role in developing and scaling the field of impact investing to our commitment to exploring how mobile technology can transform health systems and health access throughout the world.

Rahim Kanani: With the Centennial theme for the Foundation being “Innovation for the Next 100 Years”, how did it come about to put innovation at the center, or at the core, of Rockefeller’s thinking and practice moving forward?

Judith Rodin: Innovation is in The Rockefeller Foundation’s DNA, and is woven so deeply throughout our history over the course of the 20^th Century.  In the early days, our predecessors talked about scientific philanthropy; that was their term for innovation.  They identified, tested, challenged, and used the best of something, discarded what wasn’t working, and kept forcing themselves and those they funded to continuously innovate.  It was this drive for innovation that invented the field of public health, identified the need to blend the biological and chemical disciplines that led to a Nobel Prize for bio-chemistry, and helped launch the field of Artificial Intelligence.