Earlier this week, I listened to The Aspen Institute’s Does Maximizing Shareholder Value Endanger America’s Great Companies, featuring Lynn Stout (Cornell Law), Tom Donaldson (Penn-Wharton), Howard Schultz (Starbucks), and Shelly Lazarus (director of Merck & GE).

The panel discussion is over a year old, but still relevant. Among other things, I found the exchange between a Georgetown professor in the audience and Howard Schultz of Starbucks to be interesting (starting at 46 minutes).

Georgetown Professor: [Asks a roughly 2-minute long question about creating and choosing appropriate metrics for measuring social responsibility.]

Howard Schultz: “I certainly understand that you are a professor and you want a metric, but this is not the real world. We don’t sit in a room and measure metrics. Let me tell you a very brief story…[tells a story about Starbucks’ company meeting of parents of employees in China]…you can’t put a metric on that; there is no metric….it is a narrative…” 

Personally, I think Schultz was a bit too quick to dismiss the need for social metrics, and, in practice, I am sure Starbucks has some social metrics that it uses. Without any social metrics, however, even the best intentioned management can deceive itself and the stakeholders. That said, Schultz’s basic point is a fair one. Social responsibility is notoriously difficult to measure, and stories are likely needed to give a full sense of the impact. Also, carefully measuring and disclosing social impact can be costly. Using social metrics may even be counter-productive, if the measuring takes focus off of high-impact practices that are more difficult to measure, and moves the focus to other, lower-impact (but easily quantifiable) practices. 

One of my summer projects centers around benefit corporation reporting, so I am thinking about social reporting a good bit and welcome any thoughts. Currently, while I fully recognize the limitations and dangers of social metrics, I don’t think abandoning metrics altogether is wise due to the possibility of self-deceit and stakeholder-deceit.

In short, with social responsibility, I don’t think it is metrics or narrative; I think it is metrics and narrative. Deciding the balance, and the appropriate metrics, however, is quite difficult.