Well good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us here today. I am Hank McKinnell, the chairman of the Business Roundtable and the chairman and the CEO of Pfizer.

As I am sure you know, the Business Roundtable is an association of the chief executive officers of 150 of America’s largest companies. Our mission is to grow the American economy and to work collaboratively with policy makers here in Washington, not on our own agenda but on an agenda that keeps America’s economy and competitiveness strong. No other issue is as central to what we do as a vibrant, secure economy than the public trust and confidence in our market places that underlie that.

The Roundtable has a long history of examining corporate governance issues and tackling them head on. Over the past 18 months, the Roundtable, largely due to the energy and enthusiasm of Frank Raines who chaired the governance committee during this period, the Roundtable has been a leader in developing initiatives to promote the highest standards of accountability for corporate America.

Today’s announcement represents a major, innovative initiative designed to make a lasting contribution to corporate governance and the highest ethical standards by embedding ethics into every business decision. As the chief ethics officers of our companies, we know that setting and maintaining the highest ethical standards starts with us. If we are not living and creating a culture of ethical business practices and decisions, we cannot expect those who work with us to be standard bearers for ethics.

Today, the CEOs at a Business Roundtable will be laying down a marker by making an ongoing commitment to ethics with education. We want to ensure that tomorrow’s leaders and today’s attain world-class ethics standards infused by the real-world problems and solutions the CEOs bring to the education environment.

Before I turn this over to Frank to provide you with the details, I’d like to introduce the people we have with us here today. Of course, you know Frank Raines, Chairman and CEO of FannieMae and Co-Chairman of the Business Roundtable.

Robert Harris to my far left is the dean of the University of Virginia, Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. Ed Freeman is the Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration and director of the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, also at the Darden School.

Frank, Dean Harris and Professor Freeman will each make some brief remarks, after which we will be happy to answer your questions. With that, let me thank you again for coming and turn the floor over to Frank Raines.
 

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