Bob Haas - Biography

Biography

Robert Haas received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, and an MBA from Harvard Graduate School of Business in 1968. Haas served in the Peace Corps from 1964 to 1966. He was a White House Fellow from 1968 to 1969. After business school, Haas worked as an Associate at McKinsey & Company from 1969 to 1972.

He is a member of the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, is an Honorary Trustee of the Brookings Institution, and is the president of the Levi Strauss Foundation.

In 1984 Robert Douglas Haas began a great experiment in corporate governance by expanding on the ethical traditions of Levi Strauss & Company. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Robert's grandfather Walter A. Haas, Sr. refused to lay off idled employees, risking bankruptcy. Instead he created work projects such as laying wooden floors in the company's factory in San Francisco. Walter Haas Jr. insisted on running integrated factories in the American South, giving equal treatment to all races during the era of segregation. During his tenure as leader at Levi Strauss, Robert Haas mandated ethical principles. He tried to create a corporate culture in which tens of thousands of employees around the world were treated fairly and well.

He also funds the Haas Scholarship at UC Berkeley, which funds financial aid eligible, academically talented undergraduates to engage in a sustained research, field-study or creative project in the summer before and during their senior year at Berkeley. Each year, twenty Haas Scholars are selected from all disciplines and departments across the University on the basis of the merit and originality of their project proposals.