THE ‘TIGERS’ AGENDA
2010 is the Year of the Tiger in China. And the animal is powerfully symbolic in the Middle Kingdom, representing turbulence—but also energy, strength, courage and power. The gathering shift in the world’s centre of economic gravity, coupled with tougher trading conditions, means that these four characteristics will be much in demand in business.
Six key trends are spotlighted in the central TIGERS section of The Transparent Economy:
1.Traceability
2.Integrated Reporting
3.Government Steering
4.Environmental Boundaries
5.Rating and Ranking
6.Shadow Economies.
To test our initial conclusions on the TIGERS agenda, we invited 2,292 members of the GRI ‘ecosystem’, including many of the world’s leading reporting organisations, to complete an online survey. By the time we closed the survey, 451 respondents had completed all the questions, representing—for such online surveys—a reasonable 20% response rate. The results are not definitive for the GRI community, indeed may be conservative given the likely pace of change, but we see them as an interesting litmus test of current opinion. And the strength of that opinion across all seven challenges is striking.
The six TIGERS are far from isolated trends: instead, they already interact energetically with one another. Three of the challenges analysed (environmental boundaries, the aggregation of social impacts and shadow economies) are systemic, one (governments) addresses how global, regional, national and local governance frameworks and processes might address those systemic challenges, and three focus on the linked business transparency trends of traceability, integrated reporting, and ranking and rating.
Behind all of this is a megatrend that has been building for decades. As Don Tapscott puts it in the foreword to One Report, “an old force with new power is rising in business, one that has far-reaching implications for almost everyone. Nascent for half a century, this force has quietly gained momentum through the last decade and is now triggering profound changes across the corporate world.” The force, he concludes, “is transparency.”
In an ultra-transparent world of instant communications, he notes, “every step and misstep is subject to scrutiny.” So what is needed is “a comprehensive, networked, real-time, living-and-breathing system that, through integrated reporting provides a single version of the truth to all concerned parties, inside and out. When viewed in this context, rethinking reporting is not a bore—it is at the very heart of the success and survival of companies and even our economy.”
By 2015, and probably sooner, expect leading companies to be using new forms of crowd sourcing to build market intelligence and improve their capacity to sense where the future is headed—and to get ahead of the trends. Leading this transformation are a new breed of innovators, with links provided under our Innovators section.
