2.13.2008 - 12:40pm ET

(CSRwire) NEW YORK, NY - February 13, 2008 - A capacity crowd of 250 Corporate Responsibility Officers is expected as two big headline-makers are announced as Keynotes for the CRO Conference at NYC's prestigious Union League Club March 27, 2008. The first is Cynthia Cooper, Time Magazine Person of the Year, WorldCom whistleblower and author. The second is the man whose organization achieved this year's top corporate citizenship honors with the #1 rank on CRO Magazine's 2008 100 Best Corporate Citizens list, Intel Chief Administrative Officer and EVP Andy Bryant. The duo will provide the back-to-back Keynote speeches at the one-day CRO Conference, known as the "Super Bowl of Corporate Responsibility," covering governance, compliance, sustainability, CSR, environment and philanthropy.

Cynthia Cooper is best known as the whistleblower who helped bring WorldCom's now-jailed CEO Bernard Ebbers and CFO Scott Sullivan to justice for their 2001-2002 roles in the company's $4 billion accounting fraud. For her efforts, Cooper was named Time's Person of the Year for 2002 along with whistleblowers from Enron and the FBI. Her new book, Extraordinary Circumstances, Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower, was launched February 8 and has met with early popular success. In her March 27 CRO Conference Keynote, the former Chief Accounting Officer at MCI WorldCom will impart her hard-earned lessons in Corporate Responsibility to the capacity crowd at the CRO Conference.

Intel's second-highest ranking officer, Chief Administrative Officer and EVP Andy Bryant's Keynote will recap the company's hard-fought journey to the #1 spot on the 2008 CRO Magazine 100 Best Corporate Citizens list. The 100 Best list appears in the Jan/Feb issue of CRO Magazine on February 20. (Media note: With the exception of the Bryant announcement, CRO Magazine's 2008 100 Best Corporate Citizen list is media embargoed until February 20.) Bryant, who has been with Intel since 1981 and also has served as the company's CFO, is credited with helping spearhead the company's multi-year effort that landed Intel in the 100 Best list's coveted first position. The computer chipmaker is #62 on the Fortune 500 list of largest companies and has appeared on the 100 Best list each of the list's 9 years, although never before at #1.

"In corporate responsibility terms, Cynthia Cooper and Andy Bryant are the Eli Manning and Tom Brady of the domain," said CRO Conference Chair Jay Whitehead. "This pair is the dynamic duo, challenging the $37 billion corporate responsibility industry to achieve more, better, faster."

In its third year, the CRO Conference has featured many CEOs fo Fortune 500 companies, including Ecolab's Doug Baker, Cummins' Tim Solso, Pitney Bowes' Murray Martin, Medtronic former CEO and Harvard Business School professor Bill George and Interface Americas' John Wells.

The one-day CRO Conference on March 27 at New York's Union League Club takes on today's hottest corporate responsibility topics—Sustainability, Governance, Compliance, Supply Chain Management, CSR, SRI, Philanthropy. The entire CRO Conference program can be found online at www.TheCRO.com/conferences.

About The CRO

The CRO is the only membership media platform for Corporate Responsibility practitioners, and the professional service providers and non-profit influencers that serve them. The CRO publishes the 20,000-subscriber 'CRO' Magazine and 200,000+ subscriber TheCRO.com, bi-weekly e-newsletters, webinars, and produces the four-time-annual CRO Conferences. With over 100 members including leading companies Sara Lee, Amtrak, IBM, Citigroup, Chubb Insurance, Mattel, Intel, Dell, Pepsi, Home Depot, Starbucks, Avon, Gap, State Street, Xerox, leading providers such as Deloitte, Baker & McKenzie, SAP, Hogan & Hartson, Edelman, Manning Selvage & Lee, Grant Thornton, Golin Harris, Ketchum, Cone, LRN, Integrity Interactive, and non-profits including Stanford University, Boston College, UCLA, and Harvard. Corporate membership information can be found at TheCRO.com, or by calling 973-439-0060.

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