Burgess COMMENTARY
It would be interesting to have a survey of what people learned from this infographic. My quick take is that I am way more confused after looking at it than I was before.

The reason this bothers me is that the 'sustainability' community seems to be spending too much time on things that don't matter very much, and not enough time on things that really matter.

I used to be a corporate CFO. In that job I was responsible for the numbers in the organization. The numbers were used to manage the company to optimize profit performance. My department aimed to spend as little as possible but to have numbers that did as much as possible. As time went on my department got smaller in terms of the money spent, but got better in terms of the utility of the numbers and the profit performance of the company.

Fast forward to now. The numbers need to be doing important things not only for the profit of the company but also for the impact of the company on society and the economy. Spending more on expensive and not very useful reporting is a bad trajectory. We need numbers that make it possible for companies to change their operations at least cost so as to achieve big improvement in their operations for the benefit of everyone and everything. There are ways to do change reporting so that it is both cost effective and useful, but I don't sense that this is the direction in which we are going.
Peter Burgess

[Infographic] CSR Reporting Spend: Are your peers investing more than you?

Is your report underfunded?

We asked 2degrees members how much their organizations spend on producing and disseminating their CR/ sustainability reporting in one year, and what influences their budget. Here’s what we discovered. How does your organisation compare?

CSR reporting spend infographic

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