F OREWORD

have been involved in the world of corporate social responsibility and

sustainability for nearly two decades, both as group chief executive of
Kingfisher plc, the international retailer, and also through the Cambridge
Institute for Sustainability Leadership, as chair of their advisory board.
Beyond this I have been involved with a number of campaigning groups,
such as Business in the Community and Accounting for Sustainability.
In my experience, most modern corporate leaders understand the need
to ensure our business models are truly sustainable. We know that sustainability must be a core part of overall strategy, not just an afterthought. We
recognize that we are currently working inside a system that, by 2030, will
consume two planets worth of resources, but (when we last looked!) we
only have one to work with. We will need to transform the way our economy works so that we can understand how our businesses use all forms of
capitalnatural, human, and financialin productive and sustainable ways.
The difficulty for most of us lies not in convincing our teams of that logic
but in planning and measuring our progress so that we can make the change
actually happen. We have seen hundreds of years of practice in double-entry
bookkeeping and can measure financial capital to the nth degree, but we lack
the tools to describe our businesses and their impact in terms of natural
or human capital, which are also often highly complex issues. However, we
should be trying to develop such tools, even if they are unlikely to be perfect
from the outset.

ix

The MultiCapital Scorecard

Many initiatives are underway, but I particularly welcome the MultiCapital Scorecard as a coherent attempt to provide a practical scorecard tool
that teams across businesses can use to set goals and measure progress. It
is especially important that people at all levels have a common metric and
approach that allows leadership to happen at all points in an organization.
As the scorecard becomes used more widely, I am sure we will learn how to
develop further elements and metrics, but it gives us a great start, and in this
field the perfect is often the enemy of the good.
The MultiCapital Scorecard framework is designed around principles
and so can be scaled up to fit any model and adjusted to fit the differing
impacts on society, the environment, and the economy that each business or
other type of organization generates. I strongly believe that each organization needs to understand its unique impacts in order to seize its opportunity
to create value sustainably. There is no simple, generic strategy that does this
in all contexts.
Ultimately, what makes the MultiCapital Scorecard so potentially valuable for all of us is that, by measuring our impacts and progress, we will
unleash the power of our teams to do more. What gets measured gets done!
I congratulate Martin Thomas and Mark McElroy for their work and recommend it to you.

Sir Ian Cheshire

London
June 2016