HIP collaboration now live in FastCompany!
SVT is excited to have teamed up with R. Paul Herman’s newest venture, HIP Investor, in our first expansion into public equity impact analysis. We co-developed a framework that investigates the link between Human Impact and Profitability, and in collaboration with Fast Company have now applied it to 21 Fortune 500 companies. The company analyses are this month’s issue.
We also worked with FC’s web team to enable you to take a quiz to rate your own company’s HIPness. Check out the “Sensible Investing” article and company assessments.
The thesis behind this which I think Paul (the brains behind the HIP acronym) puts extremely well at his HIP Investor site, is that:
1. Human impact drives profit, a new source of value and innovation
2. Impact can – and should – be measured, such as Health, Wealth, Earth and Equality
3. Only those leaders, investors and organizations that pursue this approach will outperform and prove truly sustainable.
You can see the HIP Scorecard (HIP: Human Impact + Profit) and the companies we reviewed, and add your ratings too. Please pass the link on!
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I think it’s great! Inch by inch you’re promoting a new way of looking at business. From an investing standpoint I really do think that as many baby boomers (like me) get beyond personal financial survival concerns (which typically happens long after it’s objectively a valid issue) non-economic measures begin to matter more. And certainly investor attitudes drive corporate CEO attitudes. But it’s a very gradual process, isn’t it?
Thanks, dhammadoc! I was just thinking that many social and economic revolutions look like they happened fast in retrospect, but it took many years to get the factors lined up for the ultimate major shifts to happen. Is this a revolution or an evolution? Time will tell.
This is excellent - even at midnight on a Friday night after calming a toddler from a nightmare!
Definitely a battle to tweak “success” metrics for stakeholders, shareholders and the general public. You’re going mainstream, Sara - fantastic work. I couldn’t help but wonder, as I was reading your HIP analysis just after finishing the piece on Jimbo at Wikipedia, how to combine the collective power of analysis of a broader society, with the analytical approach you’ve launched here. What would an open-source HIP analysis look like if it went open-source?
Did you check out the interactive piece on FastCompany’s site? We were thrilled that they were game to take this first step in that direction. Readers can weigh in on how HIP (Paul, this term rocks! you are brilliant!) they think the companies there are, and why. Ideally we will eventually enable folks to rate their own companies.
I do think that we need to provide some structure to the analysis, though, because people have a tendency to overweight either good or bad press, without regard for how much of a company’s overall impact footprint the story actually pertains to.
http://www.Dotherightthing.com is also taking a stab at this– by directly addressing the media issue and providing a community forum where all media stories can be collected. I think this is an essential piece of what needs to happen.
Didn’t know about dotherightthing - thx for the lead. I like the interactivity on FastCompany too - agreed it does take supervision. Do you feel that the value of the ratings grows more valuable the more companies you have rated (is it like a logarithmic function?). The reason I ask - New Philanthropy Capital in the UK took ex equity research analysts from the ibanks and turned them into charity analysts - and launched by sector - e.g. tackling different sectors within the charity space 1-by-1 in order to build credibility and thoroughness. http://www.civilsocietysystems.org/press/. That’s one approach - all eval controlled very closely - with market/client of HNW’s looking for guidance on where to give. The key for them was that they very carefully identified their client. One question I would have for these is : who’s your client?
Our client for the HIP framework is fortune 1000 companies who realize they can or must drive long term profitability by understanding and proactively managing their impact on people and the planet.
Also, investors thinking about mission related investing (we have a paper on a session Investors Circle hosted on this at http://www.svtconsulting.com/interact/svtresearch.html).
I absolutely think the value of the ratings becomes more valuable, not to mention more valid (if the ratings and ratings system are dynamically updated), the more companies one rates.
As you know, that is the whole idea! When systematic impact analysis becomes widespread, eventually the network effect will take hold- and every organization’s impact analysis will become much more meaningful when it becomes a key puzzle piece in the puzzle that shows the collective impact. What will become possible then is that we might as a species actually become able to SOLVE some of the problems we face, instead of humoring ourselves with various entertaining, ephemeral initiatives.