September 7th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
I enjoyed reading Brad Monterio’s two articles in Strategic Finance on Sustainability Reporting and XBRL and noted that the Gaffers at the IIRC have come up with a new acronym: GAFIR – a Generally Accepted Framework for Integrated Reporting. According to Brad’s article, we might have a GAFIR by 2020, but then again we might not. Now I’m not too fond of waiting a decade for someone else to figure out stuff that I could probably figure out for myself. So I developed a sustainability performance management application to feed our own Rivet Crossfire, which turned out to be a great way to start thinking seriously about holistic reporting formats. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: holostx
Posted in Communication, Sustainability, XBRL | View Comments
August 30th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
A new Deloitte survey report – Sustainability in Industry Today: A Cross Industry View – has a number of interesting findings and starts off well, with a focus on Closing the gap between aspiration and action:
…our survey also suggests that many companies have a clear gap between their leaders’ aspirations with regard to sustainability and the way that sustainability is enabled within their organizations.
Read the rest of this entry »
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August 25th, 2010 by Patrick Quinlan - CEO
As the country continues to struggle with the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the damage has again elevated the importance of requiring businesses to operate in an eco-friendly, socially responsible manner. A movement is underway calling corporations into action and holding them responsible for their impact on the environment.
As supporters of this movement, we’ve pitched a panel discussion at the upcoming South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin to advance the discussion about sustainability reporting. Check it out and vote for it here: http://bit.ly/d8tn6A Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: SXSW
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August 23rd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
In his WSJ article - The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility - author Dr. Karnani of the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business essentially comes to this conclusion:
The ultimate solution is government regulation…because…Still, with all their faults, governments are a far more effective protector of the public good than any campaign for corporate social responsibility.
Go tell that to Patagonia and others like them.
Apparently nobody goes to restaurants that serve quality locally sourced food because they are making a consumer choice and think it’s a good thing to do, they are only doing it because the restaurant business has realized they can make more profit from serving this kind of food to us gullible consumers.
The article is a good read and well-argued but lacks the E.M. Forster dimension: “Only connect..” - shareholders are people too.
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August 11th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Documents are so flexible aren’t they? You can mix text and numbers, tables and charts – all within the same page context. You can even spend lots of time making a page look aesthetically pleasing and make the information enticing. To an individual human reader, a single well-designed page can communicate a lot of information very effectively.
But what if you want to communicate data to many different information consumers with different interests in the data? What if your focus is not a single human ‘page reader’ but the rapidly expanding universe of online web services that ‘consume’ data programmatically to make it easier for any human information consumer to crowdsource and crowdshare and compare and contrast the data?
That’s when document-centric information design falls down in comparison to data-centric design. To illustrate why, I’ll examine the Global Reporting Initiative’s NGO Sector Supplement Economic Indicator NG08 as an example. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: GRI
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August 9th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
As I gradually become more aware of all the various sets of sustainability reporting indicators out there, I wonder if there isn’t a little confusion as to what an ‘indicator’ or ‘metric’ actually is in a sustainability context. Are we in fact talking about indicators when we mean evidence? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Wal-Mart
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Sustainability, Transparency | View Comments
August 9th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Over at framework:cr, CEO Kathee Rebernak’s bio includes this snippet:
everything is connected (silos are for grain storage)
I agree with Kathee. And much of the talk about ‘integrating’ financial and sustainability data is basically about helping to put two silos side by side rather than creating new kinds of reporting contexts to enable a more holistic view of the linkage between an organization’s behaviour and performance. So let’s create a new reporting context for water…
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Tags: water
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August 6th, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Supply chain auditing for sustainability is catching on quickly amongst many of the world’s largest supply chain orchestrators. And for good reason. So it was only a matter of time before someone got to grips with defining a comprehensive set of reporting indicators for standardizing this activity. That somebody is the Eco Index. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Eco-Index
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August 3rd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
In an effort to try to provide better transparency into the various terms describing ‘new’ kinds of corporate reporting, I’ll explain the differences between integrated, connected and holistic reporting. This is a rather long post so I suggest a shot of Red Bull, Maté, snuff or some other stimulant before you start. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: holistic
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August 2nd, 2010 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
As readers of this blog will know, our financial reporting mantra here at Rivet is Comply. Control. Communicate.
Now we have a new mantra for holistic reporting:
Collect. Connect. Communicate.
The collect and communicate bits are relatively straightforward but it’s the ‘connect’ that is a challenge.
As Bob Eccles says in his post It’s Time to Standardize Integrated Reporting of Financial and Sustainability Performance one of the challenges of Holistic Reporting is:
Finding a way to understand the relationships between financial and nonfinancial performance (Most companies claim good environmental, social, and governance performance contributes to shareholder value but provide very little data to back up this claim.
Here at Rivet we are already working on this at the execution level. So expect to hear more about Collect, Connect and Communicate very soon.
Tags: holistic
Posted in Sustainability, Transparency, XBRL | View Comments
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