Last week I was moonlighting, facilitating training in participation techniques for management and education professionals.  These individuals, amongst them a financial director currently working for a small UK manufacturing company, were about to embark on assignments far removed from their current day to day.

Working through VSO a global development agency that aims to build the capacity of individuals, organisations and institutions, they would be giving up to two years to work with disadvantaged communities.  The FD, for example, was going to work in Nigeria as financial advisor to a non-governmental organisation working with those affected by HIV/Aids.  The role would include helping establish livelihood programmes, to encourage local enterprise and income generation.

Whilst running through scenarios of stakeholder analysis and impact assessment, I was struck by the similarities to techniques used by Tata in support of their business excellence model – where they address the ‘human well-being” paradigm and use consensus for evaluation.  As part of CIMA and Tomorrow’s Company ‘Tomorrow’s Value’ Series, Anant Nadkarni of the Tata Council for Community Initiatives (TCCI) joined a roundtable discussion on how  companies are integrating strategies for corporate responsibility and evaluating their impact.

Anant Nadkarni describes the Tata journey and how they assess impact through the Tata index.

These conversations form the basis of a new discussion paper: Tomorrow’s balance sheet.  What we found was that the positive and negative impact a business has on society is becoming as important as traditional performance metrics. Why? Studies are showing that an authentic commitment to sustainability enhances financial performance in the long term, both through savings, risk mitigation and added value. The most commonly used accounting practices cannot easily reflect this value, neither fully helping companies to capture it, or track its presence or loss. Amongst the challenges business leaders face are the lack of professional capabilities to fully understand, manage and assess corporate value, not least because current metrics are elusive in assessing the return on long-term investment in sustainability.

Which made me reflect, when the FD returns from assignment in Nigeria where she'd have analysed the needs of a range of stakeholders and sought to put in place methods of evaluating impact and ensuring sustainability, she will have developed some very key skills for assessing wider value in businesses back home in the UK.  So the skill sharing is definitely two -way.

We’d be very interested to know of ways our students and members are both ‘co-creating’ and measuring value, beyond pure short-term financial performance, so if you have a story let us know.

Also see CIMA's related work on tomorrow's corporate reporting and the tomorrow's values lecture site