“Accountants Can Save the World”

Interview with Robert G. Eccles, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School

CFO aktuell:Where is your personal interest for “Integrated Reporting” (IR) coming from?

Robert G. Eccles: I’ve been interested in it for a long time. When I first joined the faculty of Harvard Business School, I wrote a book about Transfer Pricing, which was sort of an internal measurement and control thing. Then, when I was an associate professor, I did a study on investment banks and how they are managed. So that introduced me to the capital market. After getting tenure, I was working to develop a course and doing some interviews in companies and they started talking about nonfinancial information. So I wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review called “The Performance Measurement Manifesto”. I wrote this article with the point that companies need to manage nonfinancial information. We think it’s important, but companies never talk about it. The companies said that they think it’s important, but the analyst never asks them about it: It was a communication issue. So I did this survey of companies’ analysts, investors, and publishers. It was very primitive with just a list of ten questions – some financial stuff and some non-financial. The findings were that the analysts and i...