Empowered by Transparency: Shaping Business for the Future
| Published date | 01 November 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12207 |
| Author | Nelmara Arbex |
| Date | 01 November 2015 |
Empowered by Transparency: Shaping
Business for the Future
Nelmara Arbex
Global Reporting Initiative, Amsterdam
The context in which businesses operate has profoundly
changed. This change is mainly a result of the current
development model reaching global limits and the highly
interactive digital era. For this reason, business will have
to reinvent itself, review its business models and become
an interactive platform. The energy to undergo this pro-
cess of reinvention can be found in the power of trans-
parency itself.
Governance models, management approaches, data
gathering systems and value creation will have to be
reshaped through the interaction between companies
and strategic stakeholders. The company that survives
the next few decades will have one or more senior peo-
ple whose main job is to ‘translate’the results of interac-
tion with stakeholders to the executive committees and
boardrooms.
This is where the real opportunity lies, where the real
transformation starts, when companies learn to use trans-
parency as the driving force to reshape the organization
and maintain its momentum in the new business
context.
The new business context
The combination of the digital era and the fact that the
current development model has reached the planetary
scale has dramatically affected individuals and organiza-
tions, particularly in the last decade.
The current development model’s environmental and
social impacts, combined with digital technology, are pro-
ducing a global record of civil society activism, involving
many individuals who want their opinions on human
rights, environmental issues and product quality control to
be taken seriously. Additionally, all information provided
by or about a company can be digitally accessed and dis-
cussed by anybody, anywhere, almost in real time. This
reality imposes a level of coherence and openness that is
not necessarily natural for complex businesses.
The era when mere compliance with legislation was
sufficient to serve as a ‘licence to operate’is over. Man-
agers, executives and board members are having to learn
new skills to operate in a much more dynamic and inter-
active business context.
The initial reactions of many companies to this new
context were defensive, consisting mainly of monitoring
and answering published criticism, trying to manage rep-
utational risks with the traditional tools. But efforts to
deal with these new demands using procedures devel-
oped when communications were still based on printed
press and control can lead to serious reputational
damage.
Only real change in the methods of doing business
can truly prepare a company to dialogue/communicate
honestly and spontaneously in this extraordinarily trans-
parent era. For this reason, companies are challenged to
change their management style, systems, governance
and business models to serve companies’goals and
society’s needs better.
The need for companies to change, if they are to sur-
vive in the long term, represents for executives and
board members a great opportunity to redesign compa-
nies in many ways: to rethink products and services,
redefine executives’skills, redesign data systems, reshape
communication channels, review governance models,
reinforce reporting processes, reformulate business strat-
egy, vision and mission, etc. The transformed companies
will, whether they like it or not, be in permanent dia-
logue with their stakeholders: investors, governments,
employees, clients, consumers, suppliers, civil society
organizations, opinion makers and citizens in general.
Using transparency to transform business
The most important new key word on the everyday
agenda for current and future executives will probably
be ‘transparency’. In a world where citizens, consumers,
parents and other individuals expect the information
they want to be available at any time, transparency is a
prerequisite. It is hard to imagine that this expectation
will not apply to companies’activities and performance:
it already applies, and will do so even more in the
future.
To be transparent, ready to dialogue or inform, in a
way that is coherent, and fulfil so many different expec-
tations is not a simple task. Different stakeholders need
different communication channels, different information
©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2015) 6:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12207
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 4 . November 2015
478
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