The Oxford-Achilles Working Group
on Corporate Social Responsibility

Developing knowledge about CSR

Integrated Reporting: A Simple Idea Whose Time Has Come.

Dr Robert G. Eccles, Senior Lecturer in Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Monday 24th May, 2010, 17.00-18.30
Rhodes Trust Lecture Theatre, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Abstract: Integrated reporting is both about a document and the Internet. As a document, integrated reporting is a single report on a company?s financial and nonfinancial performance (e.g., environmental, social and governance) and the relationships between the two. This is typically done by integrating the separate corporate social responsibility or sustainability report into the company?s annual report with its financial statements. Integrated reporting also involves leveraging the Internet to provide more detailed information of interest to shareholders and other stakeholders, as well as using it to improve dialogue and engagement with them. Over the past several years a few leading companies in Brazil (Natura), Denmark (Novo Nordisk), Germany (BASF), the Netherlands (Philips), and the United States (United Technologies Corporation) have begun practicing integrated reporting. This seminar will discuss the concept of integrated reporting, describe the reasons companies are adopting this practice on a voluntary basis, and identify forces and activities that could lead to its broad and rapid adoption.

Biography: Robert G. Eccles first joined the faculty at Harvard in 1979 and received tenure in 1989. He left in 1993 for a career in the private sector and rejoined the faculty in September of 2007 as a Senior Lecturer. Right after receiving tenure, Dr Eccles started doing research on corporate reporting, a topic which remains of great interest to him from a research, managerial practice and public policy perspective. He has written three books on this subject, The Value Reporting Revolution: Moving Beyond the Earnings Game (with Robert H. Herz, E. Mary Keegan and David M. H. Phillips), Building Public Trust: The Future of Corporate Reporting (with Samuel A. DiPiazza Jr.), and One Report: Integrated Reporting for a Sustainable Strategy (with Michael P. Krzus). He is also a founder of the social movement Web site http://www.integratedreporting.org.