Episode Details

Gerbrand Haverkamp and Pauliina Murphy from the World Benchmarking Alliance join the show today. The WBA exists to assess, test and make transparent the performance of the world’s 2,000 most influential and important companies. In a neoliberal capitalist economic system, business have been and remain one of if not the most significant actors if our human civilisation is going to reverse ecological calamity, social inequities and governance failures. Famed Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, the co-creator of the notion of creating shared value, calls businesses the engine of change, and if that is indeed the case, they might need some new and different engines. But that’s why the WBA’s work is important. They shine a spotlight on the truth of these companies performance - not to look at what they say they’d do, but what they’re actually doing. And entirely unsurprisingly, it’s mostly grim and painful reading.

Gerbrand and Pauliina were recently in Australia as part of a trip to present and share the results of an Australian-only benchmark they recently completed. 32 companies sit on that and the insights and takeaways are interesting, but again, not too surprising. No-one is a laggard, yet no-one is a leader. I was compelled by some work the WBA had published a couple of years ago called Corporate Accountability: Closing the Gap in Sustainable Development and reading it was a series of insights that I think explains why corporates here and abroad have not done the necessary heavy lifting to conserve and preserve ecosystems, communities and democracies. Seven succinct realities pick apart the delusion of corporate accountability in its current form - where responsibilities are not defined, actual performance remains hidden or obfuscated most of the time, while the consequences of either insufficient or poor action are not substantive enough to drive any change.

We get through a lot of ground in this conversation - from this cycle of accountability to the mission of the WBA, the necessity to not just highlight best practice but reverse benchmark and platform the laggards, as well as transition of the sustainability sector from the feel good and pseudo innovation team of a decade ago to a mainstay of corporates, and accept the necessity of compliance, legal and risk management on a day to day basis.

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