Extra, Extra, Report All About It
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by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Dave Shirley
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Date
This is a post about reporting. In particular, it's about how reporting on sustainability - which seems like a drag - has actually demonstrated benefits in a recent detailed study by Harvard Business School. The authors would like to acknowledge Tarja Mottram of Action For Results for pointing us to these reports.
In this post, we'll point you to the studies and let you in on how the studies were done. Our main point, though, is one we've made since we started our journey at the intersection of sustainability (or green thinking) and project management: doing the right thing helps the project manager do things right. This assertion we've made seems to be proven over and over in every reputable study we see.
This is no exception.
There are actually two particular/related articles we'll refer to here.
Both come from Harvard Business School's excellent "Working Knowledge" series, which we recommend you check out as a great resource, not just for sustainbility issues but for general management - and project management - wisdom.
Corporate Sustainability Reporting: It's Effective
The executive summary of this report is basically this:
"new research from Harvard Business School and London Business School demonstrates the first real evidence that mandatory CSR reporting works, and could give policymakers and companies themselves added impetus to increase transparency around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance."
"After the data were analyzed, a clear pattern emerged: Countries requiring corporate sustainability reporting experienced a significant improvement in most categories. For social responsibility, for example, those countries improved their ranking by 8 percent relative to countries that lacked mandatory reporting."
The study compared 16 countries that require sustainability reporting to 42 that didn't. It noted improvements as stated above, but also noted that the imporovements would have been even more significant, if like South Africa and France, companies were required to report their financial and ESG performance in a single integrated annual report. This makes sense to us because we have always insisted that these measures are often stated in an integrated mission and vision, and so should - if at all possible - be measured that way.
Doing this would also stengthen the connection to project management, because Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that project managers use could be tied to corporate (or organiazational) KPIs - so that project charters could gain 'strength' from corporate mission and vision statements.
Leading and Lagging Countries in Contributing to a Sustainable Society
This report is really the basis for the first report - where the "meat" of the research is located. The process started by identifying 4 categories of countries:
In Sustainable countries—such as Germany and the United Kingdom—there was a high degree of integrated reporting by companies and a high level of investor interest in the respective nonfinancial performance metric. Companies and investors in these countries are on the vanguard of integrated reporting and should continue to exercise leadership in order to help create a more sustainable global society.
In Unsustainable countries—including China, Hong Kong, and South Korea—there was very little integrated reporting by companies and very little interest by investors in nonfinancial performance metrics. These countries need a regulatory shock in order to break out of the equilibrium they are in. Because neither investors nor companies are paying much attention to ESG issues, it is unlikely that market forces will be sufficient to generate a change in behavior.
In Sustainable Companies countries—such as Brazil, South Africa, and Sweden—there is a high degree of integrated reporting by companies but very little interest by investors in nonfinancial performance metrics. Companies in these countries need to educate investors on the importance of nonfinancial metrics in evaluating company performance and making investment decisions. Investors can leverage experiences from investors in other countries and learn emerging practices on ESG integration and engagement.
In Sustainable Investors countries—such as India, Japan, and the United States—there is very little integrated reporting by companies but a high level of interest by investors in nonfinancial performance metrics. Investors in these countries need to demand more integrated reporting by the companies they invest in. Companies need to actively engage with various stakeholders and identify and report in an integrated way the material ESG topics for their business.
For those of you who have read Green Project Management by the authors of this blog, you may notice a striking similarity to the Spectrum of Green Projects that we introduced (proudly, we can say before this survey began).
The research goes on to use these categories to analyze (in detail) investor interest, corporate reporting in social and environmental issues, and the relationship that this all has with their performance.
We'd highly suggest that you read through the reports - they're not that long - from a project management perspective. If you wish, there is also a forum at the end of the articles for passing along your comments.
As we said earlier, all of this seems to continue to provide evidence for our ideas that sustainability thinking in orgnanizations, and in particular in its projects, is (although an up-front investment) a strong benefit.
And it's really, really nice to see Harvard Business School reports echoing those thoughts!
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: June 28, 2011 11:20 PM |
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