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Posts Tagged ‘2010’

Day 2 and 3 of the GRI conference 2010

May 28th, 2010 - 2:53 pm

Day 2 and 3 of the GRI conference where two days full of individual sessions about specific topics ranging from UNGC and the GRI to XBRL and Sustainability reporting and a plenary session to wrap it up. We as participants where able to pick and choose sessions we where most interested in. A really good plan after a long day of plenary presentations on Day 1. Identifying key themes was therefore quite difficult but I picked up three different themes during these two days that I wanted to share with everyone.

gri conf Day 2 and 3 of the GRI conference 2010 Key themes I came across on day 2 and 3 of the conference:

  • Stakeholder Engagement especially using Social Media is a difficult thing to get right. This became very clear during the session about the future of stakeholder engagement using interactive technology on Day 2. Here some participants and panelists including Joe Confino from the Guardian Newspaper, Martin Smith from JustMeans went head to head with the SAP representative on the question whether the latest SAP report was a step in the right direction for promote stakeholder engagement. A very heated but really interesting discussion. SAP was not on the panel but Jo Confino picked their latest report to show that sophisticated Sustainability reporting is not aways easy to do. I do not agree with Joe but he made some interesting points and so did the SAP representative. All in all proper stakeholder engagement.
  • Integrated reporting was also the topic over the last two days. I did not attend any sessions specifically about this but speaking to many people about the announcement of the GRI to fully support the adoption of integrated reporting it is very clear that the adoption of integrated reporting will be the next big goal of governance bodies and think tanks in this field. But I also got the feeling that financial and non financial accounting are very likely to be ‘forced’ to work together. I am still highly skeptical about the usefulness of integrated reporting but I am happy to be convinced that this is the way to go for the future.
  • The future is in our hands and the GRI needs to play a role in shaping this future. The plenary session to end the conference really asked the right question. Where do we go from here? The aspects that where covered where pretty different as there was a good range of speakers but the overall message was that we need to do something now and not wait any longer. And the GRI and the aspect of integrated reporting are playing a crucial role in this.

Another big event here was the GRI Readers Choice (RCA) Awards and they are all from Brazil! Yes you read right… all from Brazil.

These are the winners of the RCA Awards:

  • The RCA Most Effective Report Award winner is Banco Bradesco
  • The RCA Investor Award winner is Banco do Brasil
  • RCA Best Overall Report Award is Banco do Brasil
  • The RCA Value Chain Award is won by Natura Cosmeticos from Brayil
  • The RCA civil society award goes to Vale from (what a surprise) from Brazil!

In Summary:

All in all this was a very interesting conference. I am feeling very fortunate to be able to spend my day networking, discussing and learning more about Sustainability and CSR topics. And this is what a conference should be. For me it was about getting into detail on some of the topics such as XBRL, Social Media and this is what the conference was able to provide. Looking forward to the next one in 2011!

Four CSR developments I identified at the last conference

May 6th, 2010 - 4:10 pm
The Responsible Business Summit (RBS) ended yesterday and I was privileged to be part of this interesting conference. The last two days helped me to get a feeling about some of the major developments within the Sustainability / CSR field.

This is the link to a previous post about my impressions of the first conference day. Day 1 of the RBS 2010 if you are interested in the first day in particular. The second day was equally interesting but very different as there were only so called “break out sessions” on a wide range of Sustainability / CSR topics. I attended several of these break out sessions. My aim was to find these topics which included elements such as trust, social media and leading CSR best practice.

At the end of the conference I tried to identify several interesting developments which I wanted to share with you. Here they are:

conference Four CSR developments I identified at the last conference

  • The Sustainability / CSR agenda within organizations is changing. It is moving into the mainstream but only really slowly. Why? Well, there are individual companies such as GSK, BAT, Tesco, etc. with engaging and groundbreaking best practice. But the problem here is that 85% of all other organisations do not know much about the topic of CSR / Sustainability and most of them have no idea about how CSR / Sustainability can enhance their business. I feel that this is still a worrying sign and continues to represent a lot of work for us as Sustainability / CSR professionals.
  • Sustainability / CSR professionals nowadays are distributed mainly across two geographic areas. North American and Europe. But what about the rest of the worlds participation in this field? This is a big issue i. I almost feel as if Sustainability / CSR is now a profession for the Western world predominately.
  • The trend is going towards online conferences to supplement offline conferences. Ethical Corporation has done a great job with the speaker list and organization. But it seems to me that online conferences will be the fast growing tool to engage with other practitioners in the future. The latest example is the upcoming SustainabilityNow next week.
  • Trust remains the big topic in the field. Trusting organizations to do the right thing has been seriously undermined with the failures in the banking sector and its corporate malpractice. It will be interesting to see the development of trust once we are out of the economic downturn and organizations are looking to reach out to stakeholders more instead of purely focusing on organizational survival.

These are four of the developments I have observed. Any comments on these and whether you agree, disagree or would like to add points?

Responsible Business Summit 2010 – Impressions from Day 1

May 5th, 2010 - 7:16 am
The purpose of this post is to be a reflection of my impressions of the first day attending the 9th Responsible Business Summit hosted by Ethical Corporation here in London yesterday. The participants list promised some interesting discussions and I was looking forward to connecting with Twitter friends such as Mallen Baker, Scheubel Develop, Lumina CR, James Farrar as well as many other friends and former colleagues.

What are my main impressions from this first day?
The overall impression I got from the corporate and consultancy participants was that business is difficult at the moment and everyone is feeling this negative effect in their area. Businesses and individuals. I doesn’t matter whether you are in the the steel industry or telecoms business. The recession has hit business hard and CSR activities, budgets and headcount took a hit too.

ethical corp logo Responsible Business Summit 2010 Impressions from Day 1

This just reinforced my feeling that CSR and Sustainability is at a cross-roads at the moment. There are these companies that are still very successful and are going from strength to strength. This is usually the first line when you talk to people from the corporate CSR world. But once you start getting into the more detailed conversations I found that there are equally as many companies that have to make very tough decisions with regards to what CSR / Sustainability activities. The theme is scaling down and business process optimizing. As a consequences many practitioners pointed out to me that these are decisions that will inevitably effect the innovation capabilities within the CSR / Sustainability field and its best practice.

And this this seems to be an important aspect. The overall popularity of CSR and Sustainability is rising when you look at the big picture but at the same time best practice innovation is stalling. This is what I could tell from my conversations and discussions throughout the day. I have not come across the innovative initiative or strategy that really wowed me so far. It seems to be business as usual as far as I can tell. CSR and Sustainability know what they need to do but so far I am missing the strong will and attitude to achieve change within the industry. Everyone is doing business as usual but not more unfortunately.

In later conversations during the day I exactly pointed this out to Mallen Baker and James Farrar just to name two people also present on Twitter. They agreed to a certain degree to my assessment but also pointed out that this might be the perception and feeling of people who have been working in the CSR Sustainability field for quite a while now. Which I have obviously. We (the CSR / Sustainability professionals) might be to saturated with best practice to not appreciate the innovation currently happening in the field. I had to admit that this made sense to me.

What is your opinion on this? Are the people that have worked in this field for several years not able to see the really valuable new best practice out there? Any feedback would be very useful as always.

Let’s see whether the second day will provide me with a different impression. So stay tuned for more from me this week.

Back in the New Year

December 31st, 2009 - 9:48 am

2009 – What an amazing year.

2010 Back in the New YearI would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that visited, commented and subscribed to my blog over the course of this year. I will be back posting articles next week. Until then I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

2010 Back in the New Year2010 Back in the New Year

2010 Back in the New YearAnd make sure that you take the time today to make your list of things you want to achieve in 2010. I found that this kind of list really helps to guide you during the tough times of the upcoming year.

2010 – Here we come!

Picture Credit: Patrick Hoesly