BETTER BUSINESS BETTER WORLD

Global Goals. Such tables would for the first time enable the leaders and boards
of companies, policymakers, civil society and retail investors to quickly and easily
compare the relative performance of companies within a sector, over time, on a range
of Global Goals relevant to the sector. This process would need to be governed by
an independent, non-political institution, to ensure no conflicts of interest from the
private or public sector.
The greater the number of companies in a sector participating in and leading this
process, the more relevant the Global Goal benchmarks will become to all the
companies in the sector. A well-designed benchmarking process allows individual
companies to decide for themselves how to develop sustainably, in line with the
Global Goals, while at the same time setting them all on a competitive “race to the
top”. The global insurer, Aviva, has proposed such a concept and its proposal has
been endorsed by the UK government. (See Box 8: Transparent reporting starts a race
to the top for a forerunner in the pharma sector.)
Box 8: Transparent reporting starts a race to the top
The Access to Medicines Index provides a model for benchmarking performance
related to Global Goals. 173 The index, published every two years by non-profit
foundation Access to Medicines, analyses the performance of the top 20
pharmaceutical companies on improving access to medicines, vaccines and
diagnostics in low- and middle-income countries. Making this sector data
transparent motivates all the companies in the group to make their products more
accessible. In effect, it has started a “race to the top” on the issue in the sector.
More broadly, financial actors can strengthen sustainability teams and make sure
sustainable development is at the heart of their dialogue with business leaders, not
just the “back page”. Businesses leaders can help to clarify this dialogue by making
statements of their strategy for long-term value creation and describing in explicit,
quantitative terms how their investments in new business models, products and
value chains related to Global Goals will drive improvement in the bottom line,
reduce risks and improve the quality of earnings. Business leaders should also
educate and encourage stakeholders to look beyond some of the quarterly reporting
items and focus on the basis of the business’s longer-term sustainability. More boldly,
some business leaders may choose to end the practice of issuing earnings guidance
and quarterly profit reporting altogether.
Lastly, driving progress in this direction would be an appropriate responsibility to
give to a non-executive board director accountable for implementing a company’s
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