I’ve just returned from a visit to Philadelphia and New York last week where I had the opportunity for in-depth conversation with students and faculty at Wharton Graduate School of Business, as well as business and thought leaders from Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, SAP, Unilever, Interbrand, Ogilvy, GRI, Corporate Responsibility, SustainAbility, The Economist and many others. All of these conversations touched on how we are unfolding our thinking about, and finding ways to measure, new forms of value that business might deliver to its customers and other stakeholders in the future. Underpinning these rich and varied conversations was the growing drumbeat, launched in New York, of #occupywallstreet. This growing movement is yet another indicator of the pressure on business to demonstrate its ability to extend its focus beyond profit to other forms of value creation for broader swaths of society.

The fact that the focus of #occupywallstreet seems to center on “corporate greed” as the target of its aggregated angst is just one sign of disconnect between business and the stakeholders to whom business is supposed to be delivering value.

Copyright (c) Kyra Choucroun

Despite years of thinking about the traditional model of economic growth, it wasn’t until I drove through rural Ghana that it truly hit me just how spectacularly it has failed to deliver on the promise of global prosperity.

In my last blog I challenged the widely held belief that infinite growth is both necessary and viable. That piece generated a flood of responses, from howls of protest at one extreme to speaking invitations at the other. And it was one of those invitations that led me to Ghana in the first place, to share my views on how Africa can play a part in tackling the world’s most complex challenges at a youth-led conference in Kumasi.

A question and answer with Wood Turner and Mike Bellamente of Climate Counts, one of the ratings profiled in SustainAbility’s Rate the Raters research series.

1) Looking at the Phase Four paper of Rate the Raters, what resonates most with you?

Now that corporate sustainability ratings have been around awhile, SustainAbility’s Rate the Raters project helps us gauge what the future holds. The phase four paper establishes that rating standards will require greater differentiation moving forward, and that raters will need to distance themselves from the overly saturated data compilation side of the business in order to remain competitive. We at Climate Counts certainly believe this to be true; indeed, if our goal is to point the business community in the direction of climate change awareness and leadership, it should be done with clarity and efficiency, not complexity and duplication.

As Rate the Raters pointed out, we are indeed witnessing a proliferation of “sustainability-related“ ratings, but these come in many different sizes and flavours, making comparison difficult. While some are directed towards consumers, others are akin to corporate reputation barometers, others are issue-specific, and still others are largely driven by ethical considerations. Only a handful seek to provide investors with a comprehensive view on a company’s performance and its ability to address long-term challenges compared to its peers, and can therefore be considered truly “mainstream” from an investor’s perspective.

Sustainability challenges are enormous. Ratings can help drive attention and capital (financial, human, consumer) to those companies best positioned to address these challenges. Rate the Raters is a project that aims to make sense of the expanding universe of corporate sustainability ratings and rankings and to improve the quality and transparency of such ratings.

As unrest in North Africa and the Middle East enters a fifth month since the first sparks of the Tunisian Revolution last December, oil prices are starting to dominate the political discourse. In the UK, Energy Secretary Chris Huhne warned of a 1970s-style oil shock that could cost the UK economy £45 billion over two years. Closer to home, last week’s Financial Mail cover story on oil – the three letters that threaten economic growth – argued that a sustained high oil price threatens to completely stall the global recovery.

Despite its importance, agriculture is financially underserved and currently not prioritized in many emerging economies.

Highlights of feedback and reactions we’ve received so far, and a call for your opinions as we turn to phase four.

A challenge to banks: explain the value you provide to society through your core businesses (not just your good works).

Business seems unprepared as fair tax follows fair trade into the spotlight.

New microfinance rules in India have reopened a range of basic questions about microfinance wherever it is practiced.

The surprise of yet another article arguing that companies can't serve both shareholders and society effectively.

Geoff Lye contests the view that it is the private sector that ultimately should run society.

Once upon a time, they used to say that when General Motors sneezed America caught a cold. These days...