Business Leader Meeting with Rob Smith: President of Lilly Foundation

Today we had the amazing opportunity of having Rob Smith come and speak to us at our Orr Fellow Business Leader Meeting. Rob is the President of the Lilly Foundation and currently runs Lilly's Corporate Responsibility efforts. Rob spent over an hour talking with us about issues ranging from the responsibility of corporations in today's age to initiatives that the Lilly Foundation is working on to improve education and health care both in Indianapolis as well as worldwide. Below are a couple takeaways I had from his talk:

Just adding people will no longer solve the problem: Rob talked with us about how not too long ago, simply adding educated people to a country's workforce and not necessarily worrying about productivity gains within that workforce would bring about increases in economic growth for the country. That day in age is long gone now and becoming more productive as a workforce with less resources is driving economic growth much more than simply adding another body to the stem.
Finding new and innovative ideas to solve big problems is as important now as it ever has been: Much of the time in conversation with Rob revolved around the issues that the Lilly Foundation has identified in education and health care and how they are trying to solve them. One thing I found refreshing about his approach to solving issues was trying to find workable solutions on a small scale before advocating them on a large scale. For example, in the education field, the Lilly Foundation doesn't try and solve entire country's problem in one big cash-flush solution, but instead they take small, but calculated, bets on Indianapolis and Indiana based initiatives that are innovative and take new approaches to solving problems of things such as getting more students to graduate and improving the quality of education. Then if they see success in these smaller initiatives they advocate these solutions on a larger scale, thereby advocating for more proven and refined solutions then ones that are great in theory but may not be great in practice.

It was obvious to all of us in attendance that Rob is extremely passionate about his job and has taken on great challenges in his time at Lilly. Being able to have this kind of informal meeting with a highly respected and successful business leader is just another example of the exciting opportunities that the Orr Fellowship provides us. Not only was this a great networking opportunity in Indianapolis for us as fellows, but it was a great learning opportunity that we wouldn't have gotten at a regular out of college job. Business Leader Meetings like the one we had with Rob Smith today are just another reason that the Orr Fellowship is a great opportunity for college graduates!