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Corporate social responsibility

Materiality within Sustainable Reporting

Imagine something you can live without; an atlas, perhaps, or pretty wallpaper. These may improve your quality of life or be useful repositories of knowledge, but they’re not strictly necessary for your day to day existence.

Now think of the things you really do need: air, water and nutrients must be top of your list. Additionally, shelter is useful for maintain a good health and transport is normally necessary to continue to earn a living.

Materiality within sustainability reporting is the concept of how much something is part of a business’ ongoing processes. How material it is to that company’s existence.

So taking the example above, pretty wallpaper and an atlas are pretty immaterial to an individual’s existence. Conversely air, water and nutrients are most definitely material, as are transport and shelter to a given degree.
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Sticklebacks of Sustainability

WARNING: sticklebacks can cause choking, vomiting and severe stomach pains if swallowed. So would read the food safety report on these small fish for their larger predators.

They have a spiny dorsal fin which they can raise if another fish attempts to eat them, hence the name. Its purpose is to lodge the stickleback, somewhat painfully, in the mouth or throat of its predator.

Often as not, this causes the predator in question to spit the stickleback out, thus saving its life.

Smaller listed companies can be compared quite favourably to sticklebacks. Preyed upon by larger fish, they often have to develop self defence mechanisms which can be surprising in their elegant simplicity.

On a whim, I thought I’d have a look at those FTSE Fledgling companies, equity vehicles aside, who were due to publish their reports last week. Perhaps their websites would have signs of sustainable spines, ready to be raised as a predator approaches?
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One Man’s Stakeholder ….

Think of 1984 and somewhere in between the famine in Ethiopia and Michael Jackson’s hair catching fire, you’re likely to think of George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel.

Part of this is Newspeak, which is characterised by the absence of synonyms or antonyms, meaning that there is only one “authorised” word for any given thing or activity.

1984 is also the year in which R. Edward Freeman published his book “Strategic Management”. It was here that the concept of a stakeholder was coined to describing anyone who affects or is affected by a corporate body.

I would not for a moment class the term “stakeholder” as being part of any form of Newspeak, especially as it’s one of the more useful terms to have come out of the linguistic wave which swept through business in the 1980s.

However for a concept whose management principles will be 25 years old next year, it’s interesting to note that companies are still unsure how to use their websites to communicate sustainability to their stakeholders.
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A Sweetbox of Integrated Sustainability

Can I can I can I can I can I? The refrain of pester power, through which children have “persuaded” their parents into a course of action for millennia.

Often parents agree simply to get the little angels to belt up. Often the little devils come to learn that if they repeat it often and loud enough, their wish will come true.

Many companies have assumed the parental role, embarking upon programmes of disclosure simply to simply to get external pressures (including regulators) to belt up and not bother them.

In the meantime sustainability professionals keep repeating the mantra that sustainability has to be embedded into all of a company’s activities, not just bolted on as an afterthought.
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A Quibble of Acronyms

It’s an odd existence to follow. First everyone says “Eh? What’s that then?” Then they fall in love with you and can’t get enough.

two people discussing terminologyLater there’s the inevitable falling out, typified by arguments over what it was all about to start with. Lastly, the final stage is a grudging acceptance that no matter what, this is how things are set to remain for evermore.

Yep, life as a TLA* is tough. Only the most successful reach the heights of HTTP, the JK Rowling of acronym-land, used and translated the world over.

Most of the others fall by the wayside, the discarded betamaxes of their generation.
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The Global Reporting Initiative — A Brief Overview

It’s the marketing men’s idea of a near perfect viral product. The work of a 25 person secretariat living on grants and donations has swept around the world with barely a penny spent on advertising.

Global Reporting Initiative G3 FrontpageGRI G3 Frontpage

Now hailed as the defacto standard and on its third generation of guidelines, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) dominates the world of environmental reporting.

Even those outside the CSR profession prick up their ears when they hear the acronym. It means something: it has respect and gravitas. If you comply with GRI you must be one of the Good Guys.

But what actually is it, and what makes it so popular?

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