As a follow-up to my previous post on the One Report book I’d like to highlight one of the many useful takeaways from the book, found on page 149. Here the authors address a critical issue for the ‘One Report’ camp, namely ‘quantifying the value’  of CSR. Or as I believe the Founder of Wendys was prone to say ‘Where’s the Beef’ (still not quite as catchy as ‘thats a some spicy meatball’ but you can’t have everything).

Eccles and Krzus highlight three ways to help quantify CSR value:

1. Which ESG topics represent opportunities to improve financial performance?
2. Which ESG topics represent risks of generating spending to avoid a downside?
3. Which ESG topics are not risks but investments that may create value for some stakeholders at a cost to shareholders?

Now if I was building an XBRL taxonomy for CSR reporting, these are three questions I would be validating all my element choices against.

Tags: CSR, GRI

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 1:37 pm and is filed under XBRL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.