Stephen Schmidheiny

WAIS is happy to welcome Stephen Schmidheiny to WAISdom. I believe I caught his attention when I issued a note to the association recently about the AVINA Foundation started by Mr. Schmidheiny in 1994. Not knowing him      personally, I speculated that the name sounded Hungarian. This guess was off the mark.   In fact, this very successful entrepreneur, author, and expert on sustainable development is Swiss German by origin, although the ending -heiny seems unusual.

He is part of the fourth generation of a successful family that owned globally important cement and asbestos cement holdings. After graduating in law from Zurich University in 1976 - planning never to practice law but curious to see how law and its associated institutions work - he quickly took over the asbestos cement part of the family business. Realizing that he did not want to be associated with this material, he exited the asbestos industry and diversified into a number of business activities, which included being a founding investor in the Swatch watch company, owning Leica Instruments, and serving on the boards of companies such as Nestlé, ABB, and UBS. In 1995 he decided to focus business interests on Latin American forestry, building materials, and water systems companies.

In 1990, Maurice Strong, secretary general of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio “Earth Summit” of 1992) appointed Stephan as his principal adviser for business and industry. Schmidheiny established the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), now with over 175 members from among the planet’s most important companies. Today he is its honorary chairman. In 1992, he published the best-selling Changing Course: a Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment (MIT Press). Other (co-authored) books include Financing Change: the Financial Community, Eco-efficiency and Sustainable Development (MIT Press, 1996) and Walking the Talk: the Business Case for Sustainable Development (Greenleaf Press, 2002). Yale University has awarded him an honorary doctorate for humane letters.

Stephan has loved Latin America since he worked in Brazil in his early 20s as a trainee foreman. In 1994, he established the AVINA Foundation to encourage civil society and business leadership for sustainable development in Ibero-America. (AVINA stands for "acción, vida y naturaleza," or "ação, vida e natureza.")   Stephan Schmidheiny has always favored V's, perhaps because it is the universal sign for victory.)

In 2003, Mr. Schmidheiny retired from formal positions with corporations and other organizations and donated his stock in the GrupoNueva holding company he founded to a trust called VIVA (standing for Vision and Values). He added other stock to bring the value of the gift up to $1.1 billion. In its ownership of GrupoNueva, VIVA makes sure that the company is a leader in corporate social responsibility.  VIVA also uses the resource stream from GrupoNueva to fund AVINA, as long as AVINA lives up to its mission.  VIVA thus is an unusual philanthropic structure that creates checks and balances for both NUEVA and AVINA.  This was Mr. Schmidheiny’s innovation, which by their reckoning does not exist elsewhere in the philanthropic world. Stephan also hopes that if it passes the tests of time, it might serve as a model.