Peter Burgess
Background

Some details of Peter Burgess experience ... how TVM became a basis for social reform

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

I worked in heavy engineering immediately after graduating from Cambridge, learning very quickly that big decisions were made by people with accounting and finance credentials.

I subsequently trained in Chartered Accountancy with PwC in London. After qualifying I moved to Canada and subsequently to the USA. I found the combination of engineering, economics and accountancy was very powerful and I became a successful employee in corporate management.

The key lesson was that accountancy enabled analysis of corporate results and engineering provided important ways to improve results, and accountancy enables verification that results were being achieved.

After time as CFO with a US based international company I started an independent consulting firm and over time worked with the World Bank, the UN and others mainly on international assignments, and become more and more concerned that the accounting metrics that worked internally in the corporate environment were not working anywhere outside in a satisfactory manner. There were multiple reasons for this, including the prevalence of personal agendas that were more important than the common good. Furthermore it became clear that the money profit metrics for business, stock prices for investors and GDP growth for policy makers was resulting in decisions that made money but was setting the stage for a failed economy, a failed society and a failed planet.

With so much more progress in science and technology, with so much more knowledge and with so many more educated youth now than 50 years ago, the world should be optimistic about the future, but is not. Massive reform is needed, and the only way I know to facilitate change is to develop and deploy metrics that will enable incentives for everyone to make better decisions that will benefit themselves and their society, the environment and the world at large.

Technology makes it possible for meaningful metrics to be available everywhere ... change the way the game is scored and you will change the way the game is played!

TrueValueMetrics (TVM) has been evolving as an idea for a long time in response to issues observed in the US, Europe and in developing countries since the 1980s when I was exposed to the impact of famine in the Horn of Africa, and the aftermath of civil war and all sorts of violence. I was also able to observe first hand the behavior of international companies when they think nobody is looking, pollution of the environment, the looting of resources and the exploitation of the powerless.

The economic crisis brought on the appalling behavior of powerful financial institutions and the lack of any meaningful response from the established professional groups and corporate leadership shows that some significant changes are need in the way the economic institutions function.

TVM aims to be an accounting system that not only does money profit accounting inside an organization but brings value accountancy for all economic activity into play so that the impact on both implementing organization and community are measured using the same dataset. The corporate organization does cost accounting based on money flows ... TVM does impact accounting based on value flows.

At the core of TVM is the quantification of value in a meaningful way, This should be done as a mobile application. Also, there need to be data flows about elements of the state of a community and economic activities that are impacting on this state. This also should be done as a mobile application.

Some of the work done in order to get information through crowdsourcing to improve the performance of a business should also be applied to improve the performance of community and society as a whole. The ultimate goal is for TVM value accountancy to displace the money profit accounting that has dominated business and the broader economy for hundreds of years.