Bill Novelli

Bill is an emeritus professor of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. In the MBA program there he taught:  Principled Leadership for Business and Society and also Managing the Enterprise. He earlier created and taught Corporate Social Responsibility as well as Leadership and Management of Nonprofit Organizations.

He founded the Business for Impact Center at McDonough and oversaw the program for over a decade. He now chairs its Advisory Group. The Center has a strong student orientation and partners with companies, nonprofits and government to create social, environmental and economic impact.

Bill is also co-founder and co-chair of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC), a national alliance to reform serious illness/end of life care in the U.S.

Previously, he was CEO of AARP, a membership organization of 40 million people 50 and older. Prior to AARP, Bill was: founder and president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids; EVP of CARE, the international relief and development organization; and co-founder and president of Porter Novelli, a global public relations firm now part of Omnicom.

He began his career in marketing at Unilever, was an account supervisor at a New York advertising agency and later served as Director of Advertising & Creative Services at the Peace Corps.

Bill serves on the boards of: the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (co-chair); the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (chair); Capital Caring Health; Chapters Health System; Strategic Partnerships; the Coalition for Trust in Health & Science (co-chair); the Science & Technology Action Committee (co-chair) and Welcome.US. He also is on the advisory council of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health.

He earlier co-chaired the Culture & Inclusiveness Action Collaborative of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and served on NAM committees on: The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health; and also Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life.

Bill’s current book is Good Business: The Talk, Fight, Win Way to Change the World (2021, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press). His previous books are:  Fifty Plus: Give Meaning and Purpose to the Best Time of Your Life (with Boe Workman, St. Martin’s Press) and Managing the Older Worker: How to Prepare for the New Organizational Order (with Peter Cappelli, Harvard University Press).

Bill has a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. from Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. He pursued doctoral studies at New York University and taught marketing management for ten years in the University of Maryland MBA program; he also taught health communication there.