Smarter Sustainability Reporting

Sustainable Business is running a conference next week entitled Smarter Sustainability Reporting – Transforming your strategy into a competitive advantage, at which Paul Druckman, Chief Executive Officer of International Integrated Reporting Council is a speaker.

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In January this year…

Both is better

The idea could be a word. Or it could be a graphic feature. Either way, it is the concept that writer and designers all have to work hard at to reinforce. The result is always better communication. There is far greater clarity for audiences about what they’re being told.

Put designers on it

A design team could resolve how the interdependencies of social, environmental and financial performance are presented. It could determine how the calculations behind performance figures are laid out.

Reporting remuneration

With Ed Milliband and David Cameron both scoring political points on the issue of executive remuneration right now, it will be interesting to see whether remuneration reports in the next batch of annual reports will take on a different shape, or at least in some way react to prominent public debate about executive pay.

Untangling interdependencies

“…brings together material information about an organization’s strategy, governance, performance and prospects in a way that reflects the commercial, social and environmental context within which it operates.”

Motion and meaning

We’ve commented a few times previously on the challenges of integrated reporting. In particular the need for companies to show the links they see between financial and non-financial performance and the long-term sustainability of their business.

If a company believes…

The promise of the FRC Reporting Lab

The Reporting Lab, launched on the 14th October, by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) definitely has promise.

Conscious of the endless stream of white papers and exposure drafts addressing the effectiveness and future of narrative reporting, the Lab instead is…

Delighted customers delighted shareholders

If we read one more Management Today profile of a European CEO of a UK PLC eschewing a focus on shareholders above consumers, then we’ve officially got a trend on our hands.

First it was the Dutchman, Polman, CEO of…

Cutting the clutter – governance reporting

Since our first blog on Cutting the Clutter, the report produced by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and Accounting Standards Board (ASB), to help companies de-stuff their annual reports, we’ve returned to look at one of their de-cluttering aids: Disclosure…

Shareholder value vs stakeholder value

We’ve posted a couple of blogs recently about the purpose and content of annual reports.

The first reflected on the report produced by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and the Accounting Standards Board (ASB) about why so much stuff goes…

What’s the purpose of annual reports?

I’ve just been re-reading the IR Society’s letter to the Financial Reporting Council about ‘Effective Company Stewardship – Enhancing Corporate Reporting and Audit’.

In summary, the letter addresses the role of the annual report, the complexity of the reporting task…

CEOs of character

When it comes to leadership shots in corporate reports we’ve seen it all: Pink backgrounds, holding props, back to the shop floor, in meaningful conversation and, of course, straight to camera with various portions of head, shoulders, knees and toes,…

Cutting the clutter

One of the annual reports we’ve been most impressed with over the years is a 12 page, 50 x 60mm leaflet, stuck to the side of an Innocent smoothie bottle, probably about six years ago now.

The report had one…

Who wants integrated reporting?

The principle of integrated reporting is absolutely right – that is if you’re motivated by understanding the combination of factors that determine the long term sustainability of a company. But not everyone is interested, most notably a lot of [short…

Beautiful Information

This is a favourite. It has been around since October 2010 but – and TEDtalks do this so well – it really breathes life into the subject.

Whilst ‪David McCandless‬ (Information is Beautiful) is a confident and charming orator,…

Simple works best

We think annual reports need to start communicating again. Following ten years of corporate scandals, changes in regulation, a financial crisis then recession, and the dominance of so called ‘best practice’, annual reports have become bulky manuals that obscure their…

Integrated reports have to provide the links

Novo Nordisk, a world leading integrated reporter of social, environmental and financial performance tweeted recently about The Economist’s white paper discussing “how executives’ approach to sustainability is evolving, how companies are managing and measuring sustainability, and how sustainability dovetails with…