Are there TIGERS in your company’s tank?
By John Elkington
Here at Volans, as our latest report raced to completion, Harvard Business Review published a cover story called “Leadership in the Age of Transparency.” The caption was designed to worry many in corporate Boards and C-suites: “Consumers know everything about your company,” it ran, “not just its carbon emissions but its countless other ‘invisible’ effects on the globe. That has changed the rules of business forever.”
The title of our report: The Transparent Economy. Launched late in May at the Global Reporting Initiative summit in Amsterdam, it investigates where the transparency, accountability and sustainability agendas are likely to take us over the next decade.
The first thing to say is that sustainability is on the business agenda as never before. Yet the uncomfortable, inconvenient truth is that most companies are not taking a proactive approach to managing sustainability: only around 30 percent of executives told McKinsey that their companies actively seek opportunities to invest in sustainability or embed it in their business practices.
Properly understood, sustainability is not the same as corporate social responsibility (CSR)—nor can it be reduced to achieving an acceptable balance across economic, social and environmental bottom lines. Instead, it is about the fundamental, intergenerational task of winding down the dysfunctional economic and business models of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the evolution of new ones fit for a human population headed towards nine billion people, living on a small planet already in “ecological overshoot”.
This is the context for our GRI report, backed by Dow Chemical, Novo Nordisk and SAP. But it’s worth asking: If sustainability reporting is the answer, what was the question?
The original intent wasn’t to provide work for report-writing consultants and designers. It wasn’t to boost the number of entries to sustainability reporting award schemes. And it wasn’t to provide a justification for CSR and sustainability departments. Instead, it was designed to open business thinking up to a wider societal agenda, to spur the introduction of the necessary management systems, to create information-rich connections across global supply chains, and ultimately to better inform the global push towards more sustainable forms of development.
In what for the Chinese is the “Year of the Tiger”, we must evolve solutions to six great challenges—what we call the TIGERS agenda. The six are: “Traceability” (through complex global supply chains), “Integrated Reporting” (across the triple bottom line), ‘Government Leadership’ (in terms of reporting rules and incentives), “Environmental Boundaries” (the links to planetary limits linked to climate, biodiversity or nutrient cycles), “Rating and Ranking” (which help spur and inform competition between companies and countries), and “Shadow Economies” (the dark sides of our economies, involving corruption or trafficking in drugs toxic waste, weapons or human beings).
After two decades of sustainability reporting, the foundations have been laid for a continuing expansion of GRI-based reporting. If the best of current practice were to spread — for example Denmark’s “report or explain” requirement of companies — things could move both fast and far. It’s time to push for a truly transparent economy.
About John Elkington
John Elkington is Executive Chairman of Volans (http://www.volans.com) and Non-Executive Director at SustainAbility (http://www.sustainability.com).
Readers: How would you apply the TIGERS agenda to your company? What barriers exist to implementing it? How could those barriers be gotten over? Share your thoughts with Talkback!
