Mark McElroy
Mark W. McElroy, Ph.D. is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable Organizations and the original developer of the Context-Based Sustainability method.
Mark W. McElroy, Ph.D. is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable Organizations and the original developer of the Context-Based Sustainability method. He is also co-founder of Thomas & McElroy LLC, creators of the MultiCapital Scorecard, and a veteran of management consulting including time spent at Price Waterhouse, KPMG and Deloitte Consulting. Dr. McElroy is co-author of 'The MultiCapital Scorecard - Rethinking Organizational Performance' (Chelsea Green, 2016), and also teaches in the 'MBA in Managing for Sustainability' program at Marlboro College in Vermont.
Mark McElroy is tagged in 41 stories.
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Finance & Investment /
Last week at Sustainable Brands’ New Metrics ’18 conference in Philadelphia, PA, over 300 delegates from brands, NGOs, strategists and practitioners across sectors gathered to share the newest credible tools and solutions for assessing the ROI of Sustainable Business. - 3 months ago
New Metrics /
Last week at Sustainable Brands’ New Metrics ’18 conference in Philadelphia, PA, over 300 delegates from brands, NGOs, strategists and practitioners across sectors gathered to share their latest tools and findings regarding measuring the risks and impacts of previously unmeasured forms of value, the newest credible tools and solutions for assessing the ROI of Sustainable Business. - 3 months ago
New Metrics /
Last week at Sustainable Brands’ New Metrics ’18 conference in Philadelphia, PA, over 300 delegates from brands, NGOs, strategists and practitioners across sectors gathered to share the newest credible tools and solutions for assessing the ROI of Sustainable Business. - 3 months ago
Finance & Investment /
Everyone’s heard of financial performance, asset performance and sustainability performance. Now comes purpose performance, a new measure of organizational performance. - 6 months ago
New Metrics /
At the closing of the New Metrics ‘17 conference in Philadelphia last month, attendees were asked: “What ‘New Metric’ will you go back and implement in 2017/2018?” - 1 year ago
New Metrics /
September marked the fifth anniversary of a public comment that I and 65 other members of the Sustainability Context Group submitted to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in the run-up to G4. - 1 year ago
New Metrics /
One of the hallmarks of context-based sustainability (CBS) as an approach to performance accounting in business is that it features the use of organization- or company-specific metrics. Indeed, a basic tenet of CBS is that no two organizations are exactly alike and it makes sense, therefore, for them to use different metrics to assess their performance, all in accordance with their own materiality determinations. - 1 year ago
New Metrics /
A close friend and colleague of mine, Joe Firestone, once pointed out that along with new conceptions of the world (i.e., new paradigms) come corresponding requirements for new measurement models. We simply cannot measure things in old ways when the things we’re trying to measure are entirely new. New constructs usually call for new metrics. - 1 year ago
Finance & Investment /
I have over the years developed a rule of thumb or criterion for assessing the efficacy of sustainability measurement and reporting methods that goes something like this:
If it is possible for an organization to perform “well” according to the principles of a particular measurement and reporting system and yet still be putting vital resources or human wellbeing at risk, then the system itself fails on its face and should be rightly rejected. - 1 year ago
New Metrics /
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been debunked as a measure of human welfare. - 1 year ago
New Metrics /
Update: Read Richard's response here. - 2 years ago
New Metrics /
Last week, the Institute of Directors South Africa (IoDSA) released the King IV Report on Corporate Governance, the long-awaited update to King III, published in 2009 - 2 years ago
New Metrics /
Last August, I published an article here in which I described what, to me, is the most compelling business case for corporate sustainability or CSR extant: the fact that it literally drives the market values of publicly traded firms up or down in measurable ways.
To be clear, I believe there are two fundamental business cases for CSR: an intrinsic one and an extrinsic one. The intrinsic one involves the pursuit of sustainability for its own sake; the extrinsic one involves the pursuit of sustainability for financial gain – a means to an end. - 2 years ago
New Metrics /
Way back in 1962, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously proclaimed, “… there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits …” And while most of us in the CSR and sustainability worlds have tended to recoil in horror at those words, some of us have no less earnestly longed for a way to live up to them. Isn’t it possible, we’ve asked, for sustainability to be good for society, the environment and shareholder value, all at the same time? What better way to achieve sustainability in commerce, that is, than to disarm its most formidable foe - the presumed lack of a business case? - 3 years ago
New Metrics /
As the importance of measurement and reporting in sustainability continues to grow, it should be helpful, I think, to clarify the distinction between so-called science- and context-based metrics. - 3 years ago
New Metrics /
If ever there was an auspicious moment in performance measurement and reporting, this is surely it. Multicapitalism has arrived! Listen to how author Jane Gleeson-White puts it in her terrific new book, Six Capitals, or Can Accountants Save the Planet? (2015): - 3 years ago
New Metrics /
By now, most readers of these pages will have noticed the emergence of social and environmental monetization schemes intended to quantify in financial terms the otherwise non-financial impacts of organizations. But do these schemes really qualify as sustainability measurement and reporting systems or even integrated reporting methods as some of their makers claim? - 4 years ago
New Metrics /
Way back in 2000 when Ben & Jerry’s (B&J) was acquired by Unilever, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield had the presence of mind to require that the acquisition agreement itself include language that would ensure the preservation and growth of the company’s sustainability and social mission programs. To that end, the acquisition agreement also included language that required the development of a set of supporting metrics. After many years of experimenting with alternative approaches, Rob Michalak, Global Director of Social Mission at B&J, believes they may have finally found what they’re looking for: the MultiCapital Scorecard™ (MCS). - 4 years ago
New Metrics /
In part one, Mark McElroy examined three types of integrated report structures, as identified by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), along with their limitations. Here, he explores a new methodology that puts stakeholder primacy front and center in integrated reporting.Shareholder Primacy - 4 years ago
New Metrics /
Last year, prior to the release of the IIRC’s Integrated Reporting (<IR>) framework, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) published an interesting report on integrated reporting trends between 2010 and 2012. Over 750 self-declared integrated reports were studied.One of the key research questions in GRI’s analysis involved the structure of the reports examined and whether or not they could be broadly categorized by type. This would have obvious implications in terms of how the authors of integrated reports interpret the concept of integration itself, while also revealing the approaches they took to measure, analyze and report performance. - 4 years ago
