About the Author

Judy Samuelson is the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program and a vice president of the institute, where she focuses on leveraging the power of business and its leaders to advance the health of the commons. She has worked at the forefront of fresh thinking about the purpose of business for more than 25 years.

The Aspen Business and Society Program, which she founded in 1998 with a three-year grant from the Ford Foundation, has three objectives: to broaden teaching in business schools about the purpose of corporations; to build the courage, conviction, and capacity of change agents in the world of business; and to shift the narrative about the role and purpose of business—i.e., bring an end to shareholder primacy and prioritize long-term thinking. Signature programs include the First Movers Fellowship for social intrapreneurs and the Aspen Leaders Forum, a network of senior corporate responsibility and sustainability strategists influencing the future of the profession.

Multiyear, multisector engagements and dialogues led by Judy gave rise to the Aspen Principles for Long-Term Value Creation on curbing short-termism in business and capital markets (2007), the American Prosperity Project on policy to reward long-term investment (2016), and Modern Principles for Sensible and Effective Executive Pay to guide board conversations on the integrity of pay in light of the changing role of the CEO (2020).

Judy is a native Californian, born and raised in San Diego County. After attending UCLA, she worked in legislative affairs in Sacramento and then moved east to attend business school at the Yale School of Management, where she made friends for a lifetime. She worked as a commercial banker in New York’s Garment Center before taking a dream job at the Ford Foundation, where she ran the Office of Program-Related Investments, a $150 million social impact fund invested in affordable housing, micro-enterprise, and economic development in the United States and parts of the developing world— India, Bangladesh, and Mexico. In 1994, with a nudge from foundation trustees, she launched the Corporate Involvement Initiative, a comprehensive effort to encourage partnerships for economic development and leverage business investment to strengthen communities.

Judy blogs for Quartz at Work, and she is a director of the Financial Health Network and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. She is past president and a deacon of the Unitarian Church of All Souls, is passionate about the town of Gosport on Star Island, and cherishes her time as an AFS exchange student in Sardinia, Italy. Judy lives in New York with her husband of 36 years, Vic Henschel, and has two adult children, Anna and Sarah.