THE CORPORATE IDENTITY CRISIS
Faced with this new complexity, many of today’s managers are taken aback. They lack the intellectual tools necessary for Third Wave management. We know how to measure the profitability of a corporation, but how do we measure or evaluate the achievement of non-economic goals? Price Waterhouse’s John C. Biegler says, managers “are being asked to account for corporate behavior in areas where no real standards of accountability have been established— where even the language of accountability has yet to be developed.”
This explains today’s efforts to develop a new language of accountability. Indeed, accounting itself is on the edge of revolution and is about to explode out of Its narrowly economic terms of reference.
The American Accounting Association, for example, has issued reports of a “Committee on Non-Financial Measures of Effectiveness” and of a “Committee on Measures of Effectiveness for Social Programs.” So much work is being done along these lines that each of these reports lists nearly 250 papers, monographs, and documents in its bibliography.
In Philadelphia, a consulting firm called the Human Resources Network is working with twelve major U.S. corporations to develop cross- industry methods for specifying what might be called the “trans-economic” goals of the corporation. It is trying to integrate these goals into corporate planning and to find ways of measuring the company’s trans-economic performance. In Washington, meanwhile, theSecretary of Commerce, Juanita Kreps, raised a storm of controversy by suggesting that the government itself should prepare a “Social Performance Index,” which she described as a “mechanism companies could use to assess their performance and its social consequences.”
Parallel work is under way in Europe. According to Meinolf Dierkes and Rob Coppock of the Berlin-based International Institute forEnvironment and Society, “Many large and medium-sized companies in Europe have been experimenting with [the social report] concept… In the Federal Republic of Germany, for example, about 20 of thelargest firms now publish social reports regularly. In addition, more than a hundred others draw up social reports for internal management purposes.”
Some of these reports are no more than puff—accounts of the corporation’s “good works,” carefully overlooking contro-
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