Dr. Mark Albion of the Office of the President for the Lewis Initiative at Babson College will deliver a keynote address at the Greater Than Conference July 27 in Portland, Maine.

Albion will speak on “The Importance of Community Engagement in Corporate Strategy.” He will argue that corporate community and volunteer service is integral to effective corporate strategy, contrasting the traditional perspective of community service as an “obligation” of the corporate world to a perspective of service as an “opportunity,” particularly in turbulent times.

A seven-time social entrepreneur, Albion left Harvard Business School after nearly 20 years as a student and economics and marketing professor to develop a community of service-minded MBAs, co-founding Net Impact in 1993. He's made 600+ visits to speak at business schools on five continents, for which Business Week magazine dubbed him “the savior of B-school souls.”  In 1996, he officially represented the United States at the United Nations to speak on how to educate the next generation of socially conscious global leaders.

Albion is the author of seven books, most recently More Than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer, with a foreword by Net Impact executive director Liz Maw. This past fall, the book was distributed electronically to up to 55,000 MBAs in 75 schools. He is co-founder and chair of the More Than Money Institute LLC which helps business students implement the book's framework in self-directed support communities. An animated movie based on the book, "The Good Life Parable: An MBA Meets a Fisherman," was awarded the largest environmental film festival's official short-film selection last January.

The Inaugural Greater Than Conference is a national forum to explore innovative approaches to the new opportunities and powerful solutions to the major challenges of our time. The sessions will explore new models of partnership between the corporate, nonprofit, government and academic sectors where “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Many organizations have moved beyond traditional philanthropy and “co-marketing” to form deeper, more committed partnerships—often working at the operational level, not just advocacy. These are the kinds of partnerships that will be explored.

Conference attendees are C-level and senior executives from Fortune 1000 and mid-sized companies, directors of marketing, finance and corporate sustainability, executive directors, leaders and managers of non-profits, NGOs and philanthropic foundations, and directors of federal, state, county and municipal government departments and agencies. The conference theme is “Collaborating with Other Organizations to Achieve Strategic Objectives.”