Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School profes sor, loves her Vineyard home not so much as a place to get away from it all as a place to think about it all.

“It’s a place to stand back and think big thoughts,” she said, seated on the patio of her home overlooking the Edgartown Great Pond. “We get so short-term in this country, so focused on the crisis of the moment.”

There is, she said, something clarifying about reconnecting with the timeless, something about nature that arouses a deeper contemplation of real values.

This was where she retreated in the days after 9/11, “very rattled and shaken, like the whole country and maybe the world.” She found herself comforted by watching the sea and thinking of Byron: “Roll on deep and dark blue sea.”

And it is where she wrote much of her most recent book, which is filled with big thoughts about values: corporate values. The book’s title is SuperCorp, the subtitle “How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth and Social Good.” It’s the last two words of that title which might make many look askance. “Corporate good” these days seems like one of those wry oxymorons, akin to military intelligence. And Ms. Kanter herself is only too aware that in this world of stagnant wages, rampant unemployment, oil spills, financial malfeasance, et cetera, big corporations, particularly multinationals, have a collective image problem. But that, in her view, makes it all the more important that the good some companies do be acknowledged, and explored as a model for a better way.

“It’s been too easy just to condemn companies like BP that do the wrong thing,” she said.

And so her book, and her conversation, is packed with examples of companies doing the right thing by society, often to mutual benefit, gleaned over several years and 350 interviews in 20 countries. They pour out of her, these stories, too many to record here. But here are a few: IBM did a project in Philadelphia schools, part of which involved the use of its voice recognition software. But the system at first, as she put it, worked only “on adult male voices that sounded like Midwestern TV anchors.”

It could not cope with the kids’ higher-pitched voices and the huge variety of accents. So they got to work and improved the technology. Now that outgrowth exists as a tool called Reading Companion, available free on the Web. That was the social good. But IBM also won from its prosocial action, for they now sell the same technology to commercial customers.

Procter and Gamble’s Brazilian division formulated a new dishwashing liquid, which not only was more affordable for low-income people, but was less environmentally damaging. It’s brand name translates as “essential” in Portuguese; it now sells here as Tide Basic.

“Even Wal-Mart, which is not in the book, made a startling announcement a little over a year ago that they were going to require all their suppliers to disclose the environmental impact of the manufacturing and transportation process,” Ms. Kanter said. “Imagine having that information on the tags of the items you buy, the consumer choice that provides. And since 60 per cent approximately of their suppliers have ties to China, that puts pressure on manufacturers there to lift standards.”

That happened not because Wal-Mart was intrinsically good, but because it was listening to its customers, she said. Likewise, if consumers demand fair-trade coffee, corporations will provide it. If consumers demand footwear companies provide better environmental standards, or better pay and conditions for their third world labor force, they will lift their game. “Nike is trying to be green. Timberland, headquartered in New Hampshire, lead their suppliers to community causes,” she said. Of course it’s about public relations. Companies value their good names. But doing social good can provide other benefits too. “The younger generations increasingly say they want more meaning at work and don’t want to separate what they care about from what they do,” she said. So big companies are much more likely to attract a talented workforce if they stand for something positive rather than simple greed and exploitation.

She cited IBM again, which has established something called the Corporate Service Corps, a small but growing unit which operates “a sort of a corporate Peace Corps.” Groups of motivated employees from various countries are assembled, trained and sent to other countries to work with community organizations on social problems.

“They had thousands of applicants. It benefits them because they need sophisticated people who can respond quickly and understand other parts of the world and solve challenging problems,” she said.

And it sometimes offers unexpected benefits, a bit like research and development spending. The company might not see any obvious benefits at the beginning, but finds them at the end. Sometimes those come just through new contacts and networking; sometimes, as in the Philly reading project, in better technology or better applications of technology.

Ms. Kanter said she was well aware that these socially-responsible companies were the exception — “That’s why I call them vanguard companies” — and that even they have their shortcomings. And she acknowledged that a lot of companies claim to support good causes but were not always ready when asked.

“But, call me a Pollyanna if you will, I would rather give a positive model right now than just keep tearing down these awful companies,” she said. Nor does she downplay the role of government or voluntary agencies. “In Chapter Nine I say definitively that we do not want to turn the public agenda over to private business,” she said. “Private businesses do some things well. They innovate, they tend to have good logistics. But there are things only government can do; government should set the agenda. And then we need individuals to become advocates for causes and create new coalitions.”

Which brings us to another of her “big ideas,” something called the Advanced Leadership Initiative, a program designed to provide better leadership for those community causes, involving many of her Harvard colleagues. “It is intended to help people transition from their primary income-earning years to their next years of service,” she said. Until now, there was no way for people to learn effectively how to go from being a leader in their profession or field, to go on to take on a social or environmental issue. “We’re providing that transition. We want to spread this around the world,” Ms. Kanter said.

Coincidentally, a number of its prime movers are part-time Vineyard residents, like her. “I am chair and director,” she said. “Charles Ogletree is a cochair. Bob Mnookin, who has a place in Edgartown is on the faculty board. . . It’s a collaboration of faculty from five Harvard schools, and we’ve touched on a sixth.” It is just another part, she said, of a “continuum” of ways to make change for the better, ranging from multinational companies to local community organizations. “Because I know this: we need more and better leaders. At this moment in time, when we get discouraged because the problems are so big, is when we have to look at who’s working on solutions.”

It is leaders in business and the community sector, working together who can trial potential solutions, she said. Then the role of government is to prod them with regulation and to grab their good ideas and scale them up. “And I give the Obama administration enormous credit for starting to do some of that,” she said.

So Ms. Kanter is thinking very big. But also, in her Island home, she gets the odd unexpected look at the micro-picture. “Walking down a beach path one day I ran into someone who recognized me, who, it turns out, works for IBM, yet she lives here. Year-round. She’s part of the new workforce that works virtually, commutes when they have to, but lives in a small community. “My sense is that some of these larger forces will enhance life even in places like this — small towns that empty out in winter.” There will, she said, be more and more people like that; people who work globally and live locally. And whose values encompass not just the imperatives of their global corporations, but also their communities.