Hack:
Sophisticated Social Accounting to People and Organizations

By Newton Campos - Professor or Entrepreneurship and Director of Admissions at IE Business School

March 17, 2012 at 5:42pm

accountant

Accounting

audit

auditing

balace sheet

tax

corporate social responsibility

Moonshots

Humanize the language of business

Develop holistic performance measures

Summary

My proposal is to revisit, redefine and empower the whole idea behind Social Accounting and Social Auditing via completely new and globalized accounting principles and audit practices that embed important social variables such as: biodiversity, health, education and peace.

Problem

The main problem is to make people and organizations aware of and accountable for their impact in each others life and in the environment. It's very hard to make things change. In order to do so, we have to take advantage of all the organizational systems already implemented throughout the world.

Solution

Current accounting practices were basically designed to manage assets. What's the problem? Assets are becoming less important every day due to the substantial increase in value of ideas, "assets" that are very hard to control. Let's stop calculating only the value of assets and ideas and start calculating the impact of these asses and ideas in society and in the environment.

Practical Impact

Current governments have to agree making worldwide accountants, politicians and social activists to come up with a series of global social accounting principles that would have to be calculated, audited and made public by law, following the bureaucracy and mechanisms already in place to make citizens and organizations to comply with personal and organizational income taxes.

First Steps

Putting together, in a room, accountants, independent auditors and local NGO's to debate and define sophisticated accounting principles and balance sheets aligned with corporate social responsibility. The best initiatives will invariably become models for governments and other organizations.

Credits

Every politician, accountant and social activist that had been defending similar efforts around the world.

Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVue7DlwB4E&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YLIsziRnIk

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