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Sheryl WuDunn
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & Business Executive
Sheryl WuDunn
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & Business Executive
Biography
Sheryl WuDunn, the first Asian-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, is a business executive and best-selling author. She co-founded FullSky Partners, a consulting firm focusing on double-bottom line ventures in new media, technology and healthcare services. She is also on several boards: the Board of Overseers at Harvard University, the Board of Directors at BayFirst Financial Corp., based in St. Petersburg, FL, the advisory board of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and at Street Smarts VR, which uses virtual reality to train military police and other first responders.
Previously, Ms. WuDunn has been vice president in the investment management division at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and a commercial loan officer at Bankers Trust. She is also one of a small handful of people who have worked at The New York Times both as an executive and journalist: in management roles in both the strategic planning and circulation sales departments at The Times; as editor for international markets, energy and industry; as The Times’s first anchor of an evening news headlines program for a digital cable TV channel, the Discovery-Times; and as a foreign correspondent for The Times in Tokyo and Beijing, where she wrote about economic, financial, political and social issues. Ms. WuDunn has taught classes about China at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and about responsible investing and double bottom line ventures at Harvard Kennedy School, where was a Hauser Visiting Leader.
With her husband, Nicholas D. Kristof, Ms. WuDunn is co-author of Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (2020), a New York Times best-selling book that explores the great challenges and opportunities for America’s working class. This story is told, in part, by following the lives of some of the children whom Kristof grew up with, and why one quarter died prematurely in adulthood while others had journeys of resurgence involving recovery and commitment to helping those less fortunate. In addition, they co-wrote A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, a New York Times best-selling book about altruism and how to bring about change in our society using evidence-based strategies. Published in late 2014 by Knopf, A Path Appears was turned into a three-part PBS documentary airing in January and February 2015 and was featured on numerous network television shows. They also co-authored Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a No. 1 New York Times best-selling book about the challenges facing women around the globe, published in 2009 by Knopf and featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Colbert Report, among other shows. Half the Sky was a multi-platform digital effort that included a highly popular documentary series that aired on PBS in October 2012, mobile games and an online social media game on Facebook that hit No. 9 in its second week on the platform.
Ms. WuDunn has co-authored two other best-selling books about Asia: Thunder from the East and China Wakes. She won a Pulitzer Prize with her husband for covering China, along with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She has also won other journalism prizes, including the George Polk Award and Overseas Press Club awards. Ms. WuDunn has also won a White House Project EPIC award, and she has been a judge for the State Department “Secretary’s Innovation Award for Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment.” She has won other awards, including the Asia Women in Business Corporate Leadership Award, the Pearl S. Buck Woman of the Year Award, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Prize, among numerous other awards.
In 2011, Newsweek cited Ms. WuDunn as one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World.” In 2012, she was selected as one of 60 notable members of the League of Extraordinary Women by Fast Company magazine. In 2013, she was included as one of the “leading women who make America” in the PBS documentary, The Makers. She was also featured in a 2013 Harvard Business School film about prominent women who graduated from HBS. In August 2015, Business Insider named her one of the 31 most successful graduates of the Harvard Business School.
Ms. WuDunn earned an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where she is a former member of its Advisory Council. She was a member of Princeton University’s Board of Trustees. She earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She graduated from Cornell University, where she is an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees and served on Cornell’s various Board committees, including the Finance Committee, the endowment’s Investment Committee and as co-chair of the Academic Affairs Committee.
Ms. WuDunn received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College. She lectures on economic, political and social topics such as the challenges in China-US relations, social impact investing, how to heal America’s inequality and polarization, and has been asked to address a wide range of audiences including former Vice President Al Gore, the IMF and World Bank. Ms. WuDunn has discussed China and economic issues on television and radio programs, such as Meet the Press, Fox Business News, and The Colbert Report, and on NPR and Bloomberg TV. She has discussed philanthropic issues on programs such as NBC’s Dateline.
Speaker Videos
Speech at the 2010 Global Dinner
Fox Business News Interview
Half the Sky Book Trailer
TED: Our Century’s Greatest Injustice
Speech Topics
How to Change the World
We yearn for friendships, laughter, love and wealth. And perhaps above all, we long for purpose. We seek ways to help others and in the process to give meaning to our own lives. In this talk based on her bestselling book, A Path Appears, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Business Executive Sheryl WuDunn explores how altruism affects us, what are the markers for success and how to avoid the pitfalls. She’ll share astonishing stories from the front lines of social progress and how real people have changed the world, underscoring that one person can make a difference. She offers practical, results-driven advice on how best each of us can give and reveals the lasting benefits we gain in return.
How to Get Back the American Dream
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Business Executive Sheryl WuDunn lives in Yamhill, a hamlet in rural Oregon where for decades families enjoyed strong upward mobility. But as in much of America, that’s no longer true. Across the country for working-class Americans, the American Dream has collapsed. So how do we get it back? In this inspiring talk, WuDunn shares stories and solutions to this ongoing problem—beginning by simply acknowledging how many Americans have been left behind, coupled with an empathy for these folks who feel shame at their own difficulties. It’s the foundation for how we can reconstruct the building blocks of the American dream.
How Companies Can Be Forces for Good
Danone is a yogurt company you may encounter in your supermarket. But it accepted the challenge of creating a yogurt with micronutrients to improve nutrition in Bangladesh, where one-third of children were stunted from malnutrition. That challenge saved lives but also motivated employees and gave the company a sense of purpose as it nurtured a highly successful social business. In 2005, when Walmart embarked on a plan to reduce waste and use 100% renewable energy by 2020, it seemed like a crazy aspirational goal for a for-profit company. But it worked and proved to be good for business as well as the world. Walmart has reduced its emissions of greenhouse gases by 28 million metric tons, the equivalent of taking more than 5.9 million cars off the road for a year. In this presentation, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Business Executive Sheryl WuDunn shares these stories, as well as how doing good has moved into the political arena. She’ll show how companies can navigate such terrain, and how there are still opportunities to do well while doing good.
Winning our Planets Battle Against Climate Change
Our changing climate is wreaking havoc around the world, sparking conflicts, even genocides, and killing people through hurricanes, droughts, fires and famines. This is an existential challenge for our planet. But there is hope, says Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Business Executive Sheryl WuDunn. And she should know. It is an area she’s been involved for many years, starting as a correspondent writing and speaking about environmental pollution in China. More recently, she evaluated various kinds of renewable projects as a potential investor and talked about the range of alternative energy opportunities on the horizon in local communities. In this talk, WuDunn discusses why it’s possible to be optimistic—very cautiously optimistic--for the first time in decades, the progress on alternative energy opportunities on the horizon in local communities and the golden era of new energy.
China & the U.S.: Addressing the Great Power Competition
America’s greatest foreign policy challenge is to manage China successfully. If we get it wrong, we could end up in a war over Taiwan or the South China Sea that would amount to World War III, says Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist and Business Executive Sheryl WuDunn. In this talk, WuDunn shares how the U.S. should respond and how China is not only an existential threat but also an opportunity to work together on climate change, AI, narcotics and global crises. Working together, we can make the world a better place.
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