Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

On 11/28/12 12:33 PM, Caroline Hargreaves wrote:
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Thank you for connecting! I am very passionate about what I do- a combination of peace/conflict, development and critical media studies! Have you ever heard of progressive utilization theory?

This is my reply:

Dear Caroline

The older I get, it seems the less I know. I have not heard of progressive utilization theory (PROUT) though I certainly agree with much of the idea / initiative based on a very quick look at what it is.

Over a good number of years I have concluded that there are a multitude of good ideas that are circulating, and many people working very hard to make them work. But I am an old corporate accountant with some appreciation of the driving force inside the corporate organization, especially a publicly traded company.

Sadly it all about profit and future profit ... nothing else. This is a powerful part of society and the economy and in my view not much is going to change until the metrics of success are changed from simple money profit to a composite of money profit, people impact and community impact.

The global total of social business ... NGOs and the like is tiny compared to the size of the financial sector (markets) and the corporate (industrial) sector. At the moment money is power and doing good discounted to almost nothing. This has to be a disaster,

I believe that people impact and community impact (or planet impact) have to be quantified as rigorously as profit ... hence TrueValueMetrics and ValueAccountancy. These metrics have to be an integral part of all accounting and reporting about economic activity and aggregated as corporate reporting as well as aggregated for community reporting.

With modern technology amazing things have become possible