Thank You for Smoking and Saving the Planet

How do you measure a good company? Is it how much money it made in a year? Does it matter if it makes the world a better place? Or if it kills people?

Robert Eccles believes in the possibility that a good company can be one that does less of something bad, and he uses data to prove it. The 69-year-old former Harvard Business School professor has spent four decades accounting for virtue in ways that can’t always be captured in a financial filing. He’s advised Boston Consulting Group and Novartis AG, and he’s the founding chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), which provides measures for all sorts of factors that can affect a company’s performance but aren’t found in traditional accounting statements. He’s been on a mission to get every business to identify its meaning in the world—he wants them all to write a board-approved statement of purpose by 2025.