The Tomorrow’s Global Company Inquiry examined what it would take for the global company of the future to survive and prosper. One key theme it found was that successful companies should expand their view of success and redefine it in terms of lasting positive impacts for business, society, and environment.
On the fifth of January 2009 Tomorrow’s Company and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales soft launched ‘beyond accounting’, a programme of dialogue and discussion, which looks at the best practice for ensuring that ‘non-financial’ impacts on business are fully incorporated into business strategy. As the HRH the Prince of Wales said in December 2008, a vital part of businesses incorporating the wider and long term consequences of their actions “is better information, and better and more comprehensive approaches to measurement”. We hope that, in time this program will be broadened to include detailed research to build on some work undertaken by Grahame Hubbard of Adelaide University.
Those new definitions of success then become the basis for strategy and decision making, as well as performance measurement and reporting and external communication.
You can click here to read that section of the report, here for more on the beyond accounting program, or here to find out more about the report as a whole.
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