Company reporting and the art of leadership
Everyone complains that they don't like corporate reports, yet they never come up with an alternative way of presenting them. Nick Topazio of CIMA outlines the Report Leadership model developed together with PwC and design consultancy Radley Yeldar.
The model represents an important opportunity for companies to communicate better with investors, potential investors and other stakeholders.
Continued...
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Assessment of Behaviours is the 'Missing Link' to understand Fut
The article is completely correct in where it is heading - there must be far greater transparency and explanation, especially about the intangibles.
The thing that most readers want to understand from reports is the likely future performance and the risk to the future sustainability of the organisation, in its broadest CSR sense. Ideally they need to be able to compare such risks between different organisation. There therefore needs to be a common and repeatable method for understanding such risks, in terms of their ability to deliver their CSR goals (in other words their balance of economic, social and environmental objectives). Readers can then better judge the organisation on a mixture of its historical performance, its future goals and the risks to it not being able to achieve them.
Risk information needs to include not only be what is often currently reported, that is the risk register and strategies being adopted to address them. This is not normally fully repeatable and even worse can be influenced by internal considerations and politics. It also needs to include a consistent assessment of the behavioural indicators that are being experienced by people inside and outside the organisation. Why? Because it is these behaviours that truly drive performance and its sustainability, and they therefore provide excellent early warnings of what is likely to happen in the future.
I believe that the results of consistently applied behavioural assessments should become part of every report, so that readers can add this other dimension to what is currently proposed. Such methods are already available and need to be evaluated as their potential in providing the 'missing link'.