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Deep Reporting mention reporting of performance for purely internal, day-to-day As we have also said, and will explain in more detail in future management purposes. In other words, financial measurement pieces, the choice or specification of standards for impacts on and reporting systems not only make it possible for third parties vital capitals should be driven by duties and obligations owed to to understand the financial performance of organizations, but stakeholders, the mix of which is potentially different for every they also make it possible for organizations and their managers company. In its most fully elaborated form, then, CBS begins themselves to understand their own performance so that they can with the identification and acknowledgement of stakeholder manage it in an informed way. groups with whom an organization has relationships, and then Alternative Accounts Turning now to non-financial performance, what can we say about the state of the art in measurement and reporting systems? Well, the first thing we can say, as we already have, is that mainstream sustainability measurement and reporting systems arguably fail to do the one thing they set out to do, which is make it possible for third parties (e.g., stakeholders) and managers, alike, to understand the non-financial performance of their own organizations, or the ones they've invested in. They fail in this regard precisely because of the absence of context in their frameworks, despite the fact that like all other performance management systems, they are capital-based in theory and therefore must be context-based in practice. Even the closest thing we have to a GAAP-like standard in sustainability measurement and reporting, GRI, fails to make cross-organizational comparisons possible because of the absence of context. How can cross-organizational comparisons of sustainability performance take place when the measurement model being used at the level of individual organizations lacks context and therefore fails to measure and report sustainability performance at all? Still, much of the information routinely included in GRI reports is useful insofar as sustainability reporting is concerned. It only needs be put into context in order for genuine sustainability reporting to occur. Until or unless that happens, cross-organizational sustainability comparisons will not be possible using GRI or any other context-free methodology. For that, we need context, a fact that GRI ostensibly agrees with but has not yet acted on.3 Context-based sustainability, of course, does not suffer from this problem, and instead was born out of a desire to overcome it. All sustainability measurement and reporting, in order to be meaningful and authentic, must include context, in the sense that the social and environmental impacts of an organization should be measured against some quantification or standard for what continues with a systematic attempt to choose and/or create metrics that can be used to track performance against duties and obligations entailed by such relationships. Depending on how well an organization performs in terms of meeting its duties and obligations, its performance will vary accordingly—both in terms of its financial performance and its non-financial performance. Turning more exclusively to non-financial performance, then, we can see that decisions about which metrics to use in the measurement and reporting of social, environmental and economic impacts has everything to do with who an organization's stakeholders are, and what it feels its duties and obligations are to each of them (by group) to have impact on vital capital resources of four different kinds. And since the answers to these questions are potentially different for every organization, one has to wonder if cross-organizational comparisons of nonfinancial performance can ever be possible. How, for example, can the non-financial performance of two organizations with two completely different sets of stakeholders, and two different sets of obligations ever be compared, when the two will necessarily be managing and tracking performance against completely different metrics? The answer to this riddle is the same as it would be—and is—in the case of financial measurement and reporting. Indeed, are the charts of accounts for any two organizations in the world ever exactly alike? Are their assets and liabilities the same? Are their revenues and expenses the same? Of course not. And yet somehow we manage to measure and report financial performance in a way that takes cross-organizational differences in revenues received, expenses incurred, and so forth fully into account, while still making it possible to tally up the results in a consistent manner and compare financial performance between two or more very different organizations with ease. How is this possible? New Harmony they ought to be in order to ensure stakeholder well-being. And It is possible precisely because of the shared use of common as we have said, this necessarily entails the measurement and measurement models and rules for how to use them, as reporting of impacts on vital capitals of four particular kinds: previously discussed. As long as two or more firms are using natural, human, social, and constructed. the same conceptual frameworks and models to measure and [18] CR MAGAZINE | MAY/JUNE 2013