Supply Chain Briefs

When it comes to gender diversity on public company boards, there is good news and bad news, according to LeaderXXchange. Among the world’s largest public companies gender leadership scores are climbing and most companies have formal diversity policies. However, there is a lot more that must be done.

Employers are facing a prolonged tight labor market for the first time in an era when advanced remote working technologies are available. To address talent shortages, companies can use teleworking to broaden the pool of potential workers. Teleworking is especially playing an important role in addressing talent shortages in white-collar occupations, but less so among blue-collar and low-paid service occupations.

This year’s C-Suite Challenge painted a clear picture of how corporations’ most senior executives see the future, and what priorities and interventions are required to succeed in it. We have been looking at the insights through an Innovation & Productivity lens to help Innovation leaders best influence the priorities and efforts ahead.

Key trends related to the corporate disclosure of environmental and social practices—encompassing, among others, atmospheric emissions, water consumption, biodiversity policies, labor standards, human rights practices, and charitable and political contributions.

Spending on motorcycle sales are almost exclusively concentrated in middle-aged, white households. It turns out that in the next ten years, the number of consumers in this group is likely to shrink faster than any other population group in the US. We predict that these demographic shifts alone will lower spending on motorcycles by 3.7. Motor cycles are just one example of a product class where a core group of customers is aging out of a key demographic.

The Conference Board has launched an expanded initiative to track and benchmark societal investments, and their resulting impact, extending the organization’s 75 years of leadership in corporate citizenship research.

The Conference Board recently released its annual study on the state of corporate sustainability disclosure around the world. The research assesses environmental and social disclosure practices of the 250 largest publicly traded companies domiciled in each of the 10 largest economies (by GDP at purchasing power parity) in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. As we look to Asia, what are key trends in reporting practices across the region? Where do we see the biggest challenges ahead?

Research on corporate sustainability reporting finds that large U.S. companies, even in the absence of domestic nonfinancial reporting requirements, are more transparent than their peers in much of the world. Sustainability disclosure by U.S. companies is largely driven by pressure from stakeholders.