Its attractive, but very dangerous, to try to calculate a bottom line for a firms social or environmental performance. Attractive, because key stakeholders are increasingly interested in knowing those kinds of details. But the main danger should be obvious: theres just no way to add up the disparate factors that make up a firms social or environmental performance. How do you add together litres-of-water-used plus hectares-of-habitat-destroyed? On the social performance side, how do you sum up number-of-women-in-senior-management plus fair-trade-contracts signed?
The answer of course is that you cannot. You cant add up things that are represented in different units of measure.
