Environmental, Social & Governance Briefs

This Q&A with Jeff Cunningham discusses the job of the corporate director from his perspective as a business media and corporate governance executive. He touches upon topics such as transparency of information discussed in board meetings and the importance of diversity in the boardroom.

Are your social impact measurement efforts providing useful results? If not, it might be time to up your game. Moody's reinvented its CSR approach to mirror the company’s global footprint, be authentic to its culture, and align with its businesses. In doing so, the company engaged the Impact Genome Project to assess the Moody’s Foundation’s grant portfolio for alignment with its focus areas.

With government regulation lagging, technological outcomes depend on how businesses develop and apply them. It’s important that companies fill that gap by complementing their digital transformation journey with a governance arrangement that drives ethics and builds trust.

The author recommends the board chair lead a discussion about understanding and protecting the board’s reputation. The discussion is about both the board’s internal and its external reputation—how to build it; how to leverage it; how to protect it.

Are nonprofits—a crucial economic sector—getting the support they need to flourish? According to Independent Sector, there are over 1.6 million tax exempt nonprofit organizations in the United States—the third largest workforce in the country behind retail and manufacturing. Yet, the nonprofit sector is critically understaffed, under-capitalized, and overwhelmed. It needs support to fulfill its vital mission.

What is needed is a radically new governance model aligned with the high-performance requirements of the current hyper-competitive business environment.

Do you have a firm grasp of the outcomes your societal investments are achieving, or are you still counting inputs and outputs? New research from The Conference Board, in collaboration with the Impact Genome Project and supported by Moody's, uses standardized metrics to measure social outcomes, enabling companies to more effectively report and benchmark the performance of their societal investments. Being able to compare social outcomes helps companies make smarter societal investments.

Shareholders and other stakeholders develop a sense for the chief executive's leadership style through the tone and content of the annual CEO letters. In the case of Warren Buffett, the tone and content is unique and effective.

The latest research from the Governance Center covers the independent auditor and regulator perspectives on the director’s job description, and a theory about outsourcing public company board functions to a board service provider. We also released two more installments in our "Director Notes" series.