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Mark McElroy

Founder / Executive Director
Center for Sustainable Organizations

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 43 stories. Page 1 of 3.
Happy Birthday, GRI — Time Now to Put the Horse Before the Cart
Happy Birthday, GRI — Time Now to Put the Horse Before the Cart

Finance & Investment / The timing is right for taking concrete steps to standardize a set of generally accepted triple-bottom-line accounting principles, and for making GRI and other reporting standards stronger than they’ve ever been before. - 4 years ago

SustainAccounting Launches World’s First Triple Bottom Line Certification
SustainAccounting Launches World’s First Triple Bottom Line Certification

Finance & Investment / At the heart of the Certified TBL program is its advocacy of multicapital- and context-based Triple Bottom Line accounting, still new to most organizations but rapidly emerging as the gold standard for measurement and reporting. - 4 years ago

Future Value, Submerged Value, 'ROP' & Other Facets of the ROI of Sustainability
Future Value, Submerged Value, 'ROP' & Other Facets of the ROI of Sustainability

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. - 5 years ago

#NewMetrics18: The ROI of Sustainability Strategy — and 6 Ways to Get There
#NewMetrics18: The ROI of Sustainability Strategy — and 6 Ways to Get There

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. - 5 years ago

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#NewMetrics18: Dos, Don'ts, Tools and Topics Critical to Sustainability Communication
#NewMetrics18: Dos, Don'ts, Tools and Topics Critical to Sustainability Communication

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. - 5 years ago

Move Over, Sustainability Accounting: Here Comes Purpose Accounting
Move Over, Sustainability Accounting: Here Comes Purpose Accounting

Finance & Investment / Everyone’s heard of financial performance, asset performance and sustainability performance. Now comes purpose performance, a new measure of organizational performance that assesses impacts relative to the voluntary commitments organizations make to provide public benefits, contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or to generally pursue beneficial purposes of one kind or another. Let’s call performance accounting for purpose, "Purpose Accounting." - 5 years ago

How to Try Context-Based Sustainability in 3 Easy Steps
How to Try Context-Based Sustainability in 3 Easy Steps

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?” The overriding response tabulated in real time and displayed on the big screen in a word cloud (above) was “context based,” meaning Context-Based Sustainability (CBS) and its corresponding context-based metrics. - 6 years ago

Is It Possible That GRI Has Never Really Been About Sustainability Reporting at All?
Is It Possible That GRI Has Never Really Been About Sustainability Reporting at All?

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. - 6 years ago

Can Performance Reporting for Different Companies Be Both Context-Based and Comparable?
Can Performance Reporting for Different Companies Be Both Context-Based and Comparable?

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. - 6 years ago

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Companies Committed to Sustainability But Which Rely on Old-Economy Metrics Will Never Get There from Here
Companies Committed to Sustainability But Which Rely on Old-Economy Metrics Will Never Get There from Here

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. - 6 years ago

Why Monetization Should Not Be Used for Sustainability Accounting
Why Monetization Should Not Be Used for Sustainability Accounting

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. - 6 years ago

Introducing Aggregate Capital Sufficiency (ACS) – A New Alternative to GDP
Introducing Aggregate Capital Sufficiency (ACS) – A New Alternative to GDP

New Metrics / The question remains of how best to assess the sustainability of whole economies. If existing measurement models such as GDP, ISEW and GPI focus on size or welfare, then we need a third class of models – one that makes it possible to measure the sustainability performance of economies. - 7 years ago

With the Changing of the Guard at the IIRC, a Challenge to Richard Howitt
With the Changing of the Guard at the IIRC, a Challenge to Richard Howitt

New Metrics / Update: Read Richard's response here. - 7 years ago

With King IV, Multicapitalism Goes Mainstream
With King IV, Multicapitalism Goes Mainstream

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. As most readers here will know, South Africa has been a leader in corporate sustainability reporting, having mandated such reporting for listed companies since early 2010. - 7 years ago

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New Evidence Bolsters Claims of Connectivity Between CSR and Market Caps
New Evidence Bolsters Claims of Connectivity Between CSR and Market Caps

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. - 8 years ago

At Last, a Business Case for CSR That Even Milton Friedman Could Love -- The Sustainability Effect!
At Last, a Business Case for CSR That Even Milton Friedman Could Love -- The Sustainability Effect!

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? - 8 years ago

Science- vs. Context-Based Metrics – What’s the Difference?
Science- vs. Context-Based Metrics – What’s the Difference?

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. These terms are not synonymous, although they do overlap. More important is the fact that science-based thinking is by no means sufficient for purposes of setting goals or measuring performance in organizational sustainability — necessary, perhaps, but insufficient. - 8 years ago

Multicapitalism and the Two Faces of Integrated Reporting
Multicapitalism and the Two Faces of Integrated Reporting

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): - 9 years ago

Does Monetization Equal Integrated Reporting?
Does Monetization Equal Integrated Reporting?

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? - 9 years ago

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Ben & Jerry's Pilots the MultiCapital Scorecard™ Method
Ben & Jerry's Pilots the MultiCapital Scorecard™ Method

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). - 9 years ago