The following eulogy was delivered by Paul Hawken at a memorial service honouring Ray Anderson held in Atlanta on August 11, 2011.

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In 2008 Tomorrows Company published “Tomorrow’s Owners – stewardship of Tomorrow’s Company”. This was a review of the principles of good ownership from private equity and family business to institutional investment in listed companies. The report concluded that shareholders had four roles – being a member, a provider of finance, a trader of shares and a steward, but that in listed companies it was this fourth role that was being neglected. The publication of this report coincided with the failure of the banks in October 2008. Sir David Walker picked up the theme of stewardship in his 2009 report for the UK government on the governance of banks and other financial institutions. Here we set out Tomorrow’s Company’s definition of stewardship and the four principles that make up effective stewardship.    

 In November 2009 AISEC along with Kairos Futures conducted a survey of over 3,000 young people from around 122 countries about their views on climate change. The results were telling. 73% of respondents believe climate change to be a greater threat to society than the war or terrorism, and nearly all see their main responsibility as being to leave the world in better shape than their parents did. Here is a run down of their findings.

Although still an embryonic management practice, the authors believe that “integrated reporting” of a company’s financial and non-financial performance into a single document is about to take off, as market and regulatory forces push more companies to adopt this practice. In doing so, companies will face a number of challenges, which the authors say can be efficiently dealt with via cloud computing.