 Okay, excellent. Welcome. Konnichiwa and haitai, as we say in Okinawa. My name is Heather Young and I'm the very proud vice president of communications at OIST, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. I'm also the summit's co-chair in Japan. So before I introduce this session, I would like to take a minute to thank everyone who has worked to make this summit and this session possible. I'd like to have special thanks to the organizing committee for this, their tireless work behind the scenes and allowing us the great privilege to present at the Science Summit of the 78th UN General Assembly. And also thank you to my team at OIST, to our partners at Doshisha University and to the awesome speakers today. Thank you all for your time and energy. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. You're in for a real treat with speakers from Doshisha University, Osaka University, the University of Cambridge, and the Value Balancing Alliance. Not only is the topic a meaningful one, but the speakers are world-class. I have heard several of these passionate and brilliant individuals before and a couple I'm meeting for the first time. And let me tell you this is an incredible lineup. This session will explore how the integration of sustainability reporting standards and frameworks, along with a broader discussion around purpose, value, and impact can serve as a guide for building a post SDG model. So, from Tokyo to Toronto to Tunisia to Turin, from whatever time zone you're joining us, I know you will enjoy this session as it informs and inspires you. Phillip, the floor is yours. Hey, thank you very much, Heather. Thank you to the entire Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology team, Japan Cabinet Office for everyone here at the Science Summit for the UN General Assembly. And we are very honored to be here today talking about how purpose, value, and impact will drive a sustainable post SDG's future. So rather than getting in the way with a long introduction speech, I'd actually like to introduce you to our keynote speaker who will introduce this session, Professor Toshia Hoshino, who's the founding director of the ESG Integration Research and Education Center, ESG IRIC at OSEP, and also a very, very active member of the United Nations. So Hoshino sensei, onegaishimasu. Okay, thank you, Phillip and Heather for your warm introduction, colleagues and friends. Good afternoon to you or good evening, or I'm in Geneva, so it's in the morning anyway. But today I'm very, very pleased to be a part of the Science Summit for the United Nations General Assembly this year again. And welcome you to the session on how purposes, how purpose, value, and impact will drive a sustainable post SDG for future. And the main area of interest is in improving standards and frameworks for ESG integration in private business endeavors that can be better aligned the earning of profits in other sense with the earning of well-being of people and the planet in broader sense. This I think is a very pragmatic and important question. And the role of business is enormously important as we build a better and sustainable future. And I always say that when the business changes, the world changes. But what matters is how we create positive change for sustainable future through business enterprises. SDGs are the time-bound goal-oriented business plan we have in front of us to implement. And ESG is a set of guiding tools for us to navigate our implementation process. But the time is limited, and we even need to accelerate the pace significantly. Every year we have something very special about, but this year I think is particularly special. You know why? As we stand at the midpoint of SDGs implementation, eight years from the adoption of the goals, and eight years to the goal year of 2030. And it was just a week ago, on Monday 18th and Tuesday 19th of September, the heads of states and governments met in New York alongside the high-level week of the General Assembly. Once in four-year SDGs summit and concluded a very important political declaration to recommit themselves, to unite and collaborate for the SDGs implementation. But the challenges we face are daunting. The Secretary General, Gutierrez, was very explicit to say that only 15%, 15% of the SDGs targets are on truck. And warned us that many are going in reverse, instead of leaving no one behind, we risk leaving the SDGs behind. In fact, most of the SDGs is either moving much too slowly or has regressed, below the 2015 baseline. This is serious. We are at a very important watershed moment in the history of humankind and the planet. Obviously now is a time to act, but there are still discussions going on, and words and conflicts are going on, and environmental and humanitarian crises are going on. And in Japan, we are heading to the 2025 Expo in Osaka and Kansai region, as you know. And delays in construction and preparations are pointed out. And even the discussion on purpose and the significance of hosting Expo are revisited. Many are discussing again and again what kind of future they want to build. For me, this is a discussion of reinventing the wheel and the wasting of time. Why the world we need is clear, which is already enshrined clearly in all the 17 globally agreed goals. That is a sustainable, inclusive, equitable, resilient, and just world. And the real question is how to achieve it through a concrete, actionable, but yet innovative and impactful measures as we implement SDGs by transforming our mindsets, behaviors, technology, methodology, and the way we are doing businesses. Why transformation? It is because the gaps we need to fill or to overcome are so huge and no business as usual type action will take us there in time. In view of all the multiple shocks we face, the real choice, real choice we have in front of us is only one that is to avoid catastrophe. And what we need are the solutions. Here I think the role of science and the businesses backed by innovation, inspiration, and ingenuity play their best. So what is most promising about our value model approach, in my view, is that we start from the clarity of the purpose or the values to achieve and then assess and then encourage the stakeholders how to reach these goals and values effectively and efficiently in transformative way and at scale. So I really look forward to the discussion today, which is a necessary discussion. How best we can integrate or enhance and implement value-focused sustainability initiatives going and moving forward. So with that, my high expectation, I'd have to conclude my opening welcoming remarks. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Yoshino sensei excellent, excellent opening and really important message. And I think as we now transition into our speakers. So we have four speakers lined up today. First, I'd like to introduce Dr. Victoria Hearth, who is one of the world's leading experts in the idea of purpose and how business and society in general needs to be thinking deeply about this as we really go about implementing all these great ideas. So if it's okay, I'd like to first turn it over to Dr. Hearth for her first presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Philip. And thank you for the wonderful openings that set the scene in a really super way for what's coming next. I'm just going to share my screen. I hope you can all see that well. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So I'm going to start with the takeaways was first trying to make sure I can see my own screen. The key takeaways, two problems and two solutions, I would suggest. Firstly, we have a problem that if we don't clarify the pinnacle value creation goal that we are seeking. And the value that we want to protect in the process in accountability ready terms. Then we are in danger of not achieving that. Secondly, that there is in terms of solution to that problem, the key takeaway that there is strong consensus on the goal. But it requires re expressing the Bruntland report and re expressing and reminding ourselves about what an economy is and what business and organizations are within it. And secondly, there is strong consensus about what needs protecting in the process. And I believe that whilst at the macro level, the SDGs orientate us in terms of the goal. In fact, as soon as you move into the decision making of an organization, they become parameters in which you achieve your optimizing goal. And I'll dig into that because I think separating optimizing goal from minimum conditions you need to meet while doing it is key to being able to actually unlock the governance and the decisions that we need. And, and there is strong consensus on it. They need clarifying so we have the consensus, but they need clarifying again in accountability ready terms. The third takeaway is another problem that if we don't embed this goal and parameters in governance within organizations at both the macro sort of political economy sphere but the mezzo level of organizations of all sizes. So that we make sure that decisions are aligned with the goal and the parameters, then really it just remains at the macro level a nice idea. And I think that's where we're hitting problems in terms of implementing the SDGs this connection between the macro and that mezzo level of organizational decision making we have specialists in both domains. Very often they are separate and the connection is not there. And I would say as the fourth takeaway that the solution is, again, that we have the base consensus about the governance we need. We just have to make it happen. So here's a quote to start us off in the right setting flawed myopic systems compel well intentioned leaders to take actions that harm the environment and society. The enemy is not these leaders. It is the flawed thinking and systems that compel their harmful behavior. And again, we need to be leaning in to these systems, and it is governance that's the lever of these systems and purpose that is the orientation within them. So I'm going to start by grounding some key terms that again to the opening conversations that we had. It's not that these are new. We just need reminding of them. We're not here to reinvent the wheel, but we've almost forgotten the basics as sustainability has become so proliferated and moved from a sort of a core. So I'm going to focus firstly at the macro level and then the mezzo level and the connection of those two in order to be able to because we need those two levels working to be able to unleash the energy at the level of individuals and people at the center. So I'll start with well being sustainability and economy at the macro level and why these things are actually fundamentally aligned. But again, we've just forgotten that you might say. So firstly, the economy. We need to remind ourselves that despite all the clever specificities that we've gone down that ultimately an economy is there to allocate scarce but it's not just scarce actually to allocate resources to optimize well being and variously it's been called welfare, flourishing prosperity, the good life, eudaimonia. There are lots of ways we can call it. We can call it sausage. It doesn't matter what we call it, but we need to remember that there is a an umbrella term where philosophers over thousands of years have been thinking about this that is the goal. It's not any old thing. It is that we have just relegated as I'll go into the way to achieve that to a set of assumptions that are flawed and not governed for this goal. So the role of the economy is to do that and to do it for society over the long term and the social license to operate derives from this. We also have to remember in terms of the economy that that makes organization societies innovation nerve center. And again, we've really forgotten that and in solving the problems that we face, we need to be unleashing the power of organizations and business within an economy to be able to solve these problems and at the moment we're pointing in the opposite direction in my view. The second key concept then is well well being, you know, what is that again, it doesn't matter the name we call it, it's the concept that matters to positive state of being where current and future needs are met, such that there is the capacity and opportunity to flourish. That is a definition that was in the British standards social impact. I believe that defining and coming up with a global view of well being that puts it as the pinnacle goal, and it becomes the accountability frame is one of the most important key tasks we need to do to unlock change. As you can see here the connection as is always been known between meeting needs, that's at the heart of the Bruntland definition at the bottom there, and well being as the consequence of that. What matters is that the definition in Bruntland have no matter how good and how important it is, and that we have consensus on it needs is a co opted term spent a lot of time in the needs literature. And it is complex it's used in different ways. And ultimately those needs equal well being, and it's becoming a term that's being used more and more. And it is a way that we can turn a phrase that has been co opted and used and that's great it means people can come to the party can all talk about sustainability, but it loses its value and it loses its value as an accountability anchor, but you can anchor against the concept of long term well being for all, because it has three key elements it's not any old thing is this thing called well being and we need to debate continually what that is, but that is the pinnacle debate question for humanity. It's not just for some people it's for everybody hugely important foundational principle, and it's not just for now it's in the long term. And my proposition, one of the core propositions is that therefore the definition of sustainability, the definition of the goal of an economy and effective economy. And also me also humanity shared purpose, if you ask enough wise you will get to those three things. And if that is the case, and we just know it is and it's everywhere in our conversations from my view. Then we should say it, because we can use that as the accountability anchor within which we then make decisions and strategize the question so we can call that the meta purpose. The question then becomes, how do we achieve this meta purpose. And that's where we bridge from the macro. And yes we need policies that are anchoring to this long term well being goal. But we then need to govern organizations and businesses at the mezzo level to do two things do their best contribution to that goal they can't do all of it. They can't, but they can optimize innovatively for a contribution to that that is optimal. But we also then need them while achieving that purpose to do that within minimum thresholds for healthy social and environmental systems. And that for me is where the SDG comes in, SDGs come in but also planetary boundaries, donut economics, reporting 3.0 and all the great work but also the SDGs. Because ultimately, mostly, for example the SDGs are expressions of minimum bars we need to meet, and we need to turn those into hard thresholds of decision making that are governed, but then enable the innovation for the end goal. So that's the first set of concepts. The second, then is it that mezzo level. And this is where it gets a little bit technical around decision making but this but at the highest possible level. And again, this is stripped down and my role over the last 21 years has been to try to simplify because there is a lot of over complexifying of what actually we can simplify. And that is that in any organization or any system or any subpart of that system. When you move together to do you are coming to do something. So there is an optimizing goal, whether that's made clear or not. And that will be based on your worldviews about what you think is valuable to do how the world works and therefore how to act. And that will form the basis of the optimizing goal at an organization level that's purpose. But then as you move down, you then nest that into sub goals. You then have parameters, as I was saying before parameters that say achieve this goal but you've got to achieve it within this slot. So I want to make a cup of tea, but it's got to use what I've got in the house and I need to do it within 10 minutes. I can choose the milk I've got three different varieties. But that's my goal and these are my parameters is a very simplistic view but you can test that at any level of the system. This then makes clear what strategy is because strategy is merely how do I achieve that goal within those parameters in the dynamic context in which I sit. And from that you get investment, action, impact, behaviors, everything. So once we lay these out and then we remember that the basis of culture is our worldviews. World views that then become manifested in decision making in context over time and become embedded in routinized structures and ways of thinking hardware and software. That is culture. Governance sets the goal sets the parameters overseas that direction and and is accountable for it direction accountability and oversight. And so therefore governance is core to manifesting the world views, guiding all the decisions that are made and therefore absolutely fundamental to whether or not our organizations are aligned with a sustainable future or not. Now, I'm just briefly I'm going to mention again in a minute but I'm briefly mentioning ISO 37000 one of the roles I had was to facilitate to lead the process with my co co lead from Trinidad and Tobago to create the world's first truly multi stakeholder view of what is good governance and the idea of purpose of goal of parameters and strategy that I just mentioned is all in there. So I'm now going to lean on a triangle to take this one level further to try to take that understanding of the ultimate goals sustainability the economy bring it bridge the macro and the and the mezzo level to show also what form of decision making we are currently making happen. Why how that's manifested in the governance and the decision making of our organizations and why therefore we have unsustainability, and what therefore we need to do about it. Again, in the simplest terms that I think that we might ever get to. And this is leaning on Herman Daley's triangle who you may know, and Herman Daley who focused at the macro level. I was able to converse with him just before he died and he confirmed that to me that his focus had been the macro, not decision making, and was happy that we this is just this is not my work this is what we're all trying to say, trying to bridge that divide. Donella Meadows also leaned on this. And the key insights are that we have this ultimate end. This is business as usual by the way, this is the business as usual system. So we have the end goal, but it's off limits, because we say that the way that the market works means that well being for everybody long term pops out at the end. Nobody should be taking care of it the businesses and organizations shouldn't be trying to even question what well being is, as long as they are reading demand in the marketplace and delivering it. Then that will just automatically happen because everyone else is doing their bit. Now that would be fine. If someone was governing whether the goal was being met, of course that's not happening, because what we have proxied finance for well being that's the core of this system. And hence, even at a governmental level, and even at a citizen level the ultimate governing body, we are not questioning whether that goal is met. We are merely questioning whether we've made enough money to buy well being in the marketplace, as if it's a proxy. So what we also have, of course, is the foundational means that's a healthy natural human and social capitals that any organization needs the right stocks and flows of. Also the environmental and social systems that sit beneath that that enable that. And that's everything that we're talking about when we talk about climate and social cohesion and then we have the stakeholders that gatekeep and embody those. The stakeholders have been off balance sheet and we know that we have no real laws to try to to account for them, and they have been literally therefore out of decision making. So what we have done is curtailed humanities innovation nerve center, essentially to a curtailed goal of financial optimization within a curtailed resource means of healthy stocks and flows of financial capital. There are different countries and ways of doing this and there are variations of this. However, we have to acknowledge that this view of how a market works, and the role of an organization, especially business in relation to it is encoded in a lot of our international institutions, our legislative contexts, and, and most importantly in our cultural assumptions even my 13 year old son tells me that the point of business is to make as much money as possible. We have an issue, and we need to address it, because we had the luxury of saying well what's valuable we can leave that to the market the market will decide. And as long as we're making enough money everything's going to be fine when our end game time, we have to get real about what's really important. And we need to bring these parameters that the goal into decision making and the parameters into to decision making. And of course, that's what's happening because unsustainability has resulted. And we have now moving to what I would call logic to so logic to his business as usual, most organizations. And why not society has told organizations to act like that we legislate for it. But a lot of organizations are starting to push and say, you know what, this is not working. We are not going to survive. We're not even going to make what, even if we just assume that everything about business as usual the way the market works and well being pop out at the end, let's assume that that's all fine still and the right goal is financial optimization. We're not going to achieve that in this even in anything but the short term, unless we start making decisions to the long term. And that is what what has brought in the ability to have the language of SDGs for people to talk about stronger regulation leveling the playing field net zero. That is essentially what happens when you move your decision making to the long term. You can start to make a business case that can say we will divert value. So we will divert investments and energy of any capital from short term extraction to being able to invest in our stakeholders invest in a healthy climate because there's a business case for doing so. When you're in logic one, the only business case that will get through for addressing sustainability is, will it affect my short term profits if I don't act. And that's where you get CSR type activities that are just placating stakeholders. When you move down to a second logic where you really see the longer term picture. And you say I'm optimizing for my long term self interest financial self interest. We do start to be able to bring on the SDGs. Therefore ESG or let's just call it because this is what it is expressions of thresholds for our ability to be in business. This is in logic to language. Now we're right at the beginning. We have some express thresholds for climate. We have not made those hard parameters. We're not governing them as hard parameters. We are still just letting it be voluntary. We are confusingly let's letting the other stuff coming one by one not based on the science, but based on whether we think we can hinge it into middle of the triangle. That's not going to work, because actually the reality of the system and the value that's being destroyed is not compatible. And we have therefore chaos and confusion, which is drowning the innovative capacity of organizations and creating bureaucracy, because what we're trying to say is that the ultimate goal of s ESG is to say is the society to say, you have to prove to us as an organization that you are not asset stripping the society, and you're operating within these thresholds. And if you can't, and using the principle of prudence the precautionary principle and if you can't, then you cannot be in business you cannot take our precious resources and transform them. This is where we're trying to go. I don't see that being clearly expressed so that we can all leapfrog, because we cannot change our business models to climate and change everything about the way an organization works and then say, Oh, I think we'll do biodiversity now, now soil erosion and antimicrobial resistance and social cohesion and it's not possible. We need to have this bigger picture in mind, and there are tools out there that do that. So this is where purpose comes in, because purpose essentially extends the goal. It says that our reason to exist is not to make as much money as possible, it is to achieve a strategic optimal contribution to long term well being for all people on planet. To do that, we need healthy stocks and flows of financial capital to pay the bills to meet this expectation of stakeholders and to invest in that purpose. But we also need healthy stocks and flows of all the other capitals, hence integrated reporting, but we also need to make sure we're working collectively to make sure that our business models are operating within those healthy thresholds. And then the final point is that we're not starting from fresh. We understand, we are starting to get real clarity on what a purpose driven organization is and how it aligns with that sustainable future. And this is PAS A28 and this is the definition of a purpose that aligns that organizational system with a sustainable future. We have ISO 37000 on governance of organizations, which sets out what good governance looks like in a way that is aligned. And so we have to recognize that the biggest possible level and I would love it if we could start at least expressing this level of coherence as a global community that we need to move from a GDP focused goal economy to a well being economy from profit optimizing organizations to what purpose driven organizations in order to unleash instead of financially driven working lives, meaningful working lives. That is the problem on the left. It is as clear as day I think to most people. The solution is also as clear as day if we can bring it into clarity. We have the well being economy alliance governments trying to sign up to do this change policy. And we also know that CEOs are looking to deliver only 11% of CEO surveyed thought that their role was to deliver for shareholder returns. We have a normative shift going on as well. And we have purpose driven organizations we have companies working, working to deliver and test and learn. But what we have is a legislative system that is stopping these kinds of organizations and stopping the kind of governance that's in ISO 37000. So if we don't make this value context clear, we will never achieve it. And we also know that people want to work and are willing to leave their organizations if they do not align with their values. So that is the energy waiting to be unleashed. So final slide, just back to those key takeaways. The problem is that if we don't clarify that pinnacle goal in accountability ready terms, we won't achieve it. But we know what that is. Really, and we can choose different words, but it's long term well being for all people and planet. Now that's necessarily but let's state it to be clear achieve within thresholds of social environmental health. We have a problem that if we don't embed this and goals and parameters in governance in organ and that includes the UN and it also includes government, then it will just remain a nice idea. So we have the consensus already. So let's lean into and co create together. The next version of ISO 37000 a global version of purpose driven organization standard, and let's make it happen. Thank you. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you very much Victoria that was spectacular. And I think that's a fundamentally important starting point, and maybe even ending point all together in one presented. I think the shift now from that overall vision of governance and purpose, and the value impacts that it has. I'd love to shift over now to Dr Mario Abela, who is a senior strategic advisor for the value balancing alliance and also the global chair for wiki. So we put this into the context of a number of the global sustainability initiatives and standards and frameworks, specifically a frag, and I SSB and things from that overall global perspective of sustainability standards. So, Mario, I guess I'd love to hear your presentation next. Thanks Phillip and thanks Victoria for a fantastic presentation. So I'm going to take you through the, the murky world of standards and transparency. So there's. Sorry. So as we heard at the very start of. This seminar today. We're not actually moving fast enough and we're actually moving in the wrong direction. So. Why, why this emphasis on reporting. So it comes from a theory of change that believes. That by improving the transparency by making companies accountable for their actions being transparent about the impacts that they're having. We see a change of behavior. And this is welded into target 12.6 under SDG 12 about promoting sustainability reporting. So, so basically the rationale is that basically market failure. Can't really be addressed by markets alone and that we have made regulation ineffective. And so we need this to be working much better as a system rather than a series of a tick box tick box requirements where the focus is on compliance. And not in improving well-being. So I think that that quote from Antonio Gutierrez from last week is a very powerful one because he says this isn't just a list of goals. These carry their hopes, dreams, rights and expectations of people everywhere. And I think it's really important that as Victoria was saying we don't get caught up in word games. Oh, I mean something slightly different by this word instead of this word. I think we're all very clear of what the problem is. I think we're all very clear of what the solution is. And I think it's about how do we actually bridge that gap? How do we make the transformation that's needed? So this is another version of Victoria's diagram she had at the end there that showed the ecosystem. So I'm an accountant. So I present here the World Economic Forum's version, which is much more tidy and way accountants like things to be tidy. And you'll see that this is a complex system. There are many components to this. But I think we need to be careful that we don't get overwhelmed when we think about the reporting sphere that, oh, there's just so many standards. There are just so many options that it's difficult to kind of navigate and see the way through. And at a regulatory level that's been recognized by securities regulators in terms of IOSCO G20. They've all called for there to be some rationalization of this system so that we're not wasting time just trying to navigate within the system, which is where a lot of us are kind of stuck at the moment. So just to give you an overview of the changed landscape. So we're witnessing now a fundamental shift in the nature of reporting up until now sustainability reporting has been in most jurisdictions largely a voluntary practice. So that means that companies have been able to report using whatever standards they choose to apply and to apply those standards selectively and often without any assurance. So to kind of signal where we've now moved to, we're now moving to that being very much a mandatory exercise. Now the ISSB has no legal authority to set accounting standards. But its standards for financial reporting are accepted and used and actually part of the law in over 120 countries. So it has become the kind of legitimate home for sustainability reporting. And the idea is that the new International Sustainability Standards Board sets a global baseline which is then adopted by countries. And we know that countries like Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea and United Kingdom have all indicated that it will adopt the two standards that so far we have two standards that have been developed by the ISSB. But through a national endorsement process. So that means that in Japan there will be these international standards which will be adapted translated into what is relevant for a Japanese context. And so we have two standards now effective that came into force in the summer of this year or the middle of this year. They are S1 which basically sets out general requirements for reporting and S2 which are the climate related disclosures. So at the moment we only have two standards at the international level and the ISSB has just closed its consultation where it's considering what topics to pick up going forward in terms of its future agenda. Now, a lot of commentators have said, well, this hasn't been very ambitious. We haven't got very far. This is codified TCFD no more. It's not moving fast enough. And to use Victoria's vernacular. It's just reinforcing business as usual. So in parallel to this Europe has really some amazing breakthroughs in terms of the Green Deal. We have the European government has really pierced through a lot of the rhetoric with its Green Deal and it's promulgated the CSRD, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. That is just one part of a package of reforms that have really looked at how do we actually start to accelerate the transition. And so in Europe we have a new set of accounting standards for sustainability called ESRS, European Sustainability Reporting Standards. The idea is to construct them around existing GRI requirements and ISSB. So this idea of interoperability. And if any of you have ever traveled, you know how difficult interoperability is when you take out your laptop and you try and plug it in in Tokyo and you realize actually I've got a UK plug and this isn't going to work at all. So interoperability is a very nice idea, but globally we're very much struggled with trying to make things uniform and standardised. So the idea is that we have in Europe some sector agnostic standards and I'm going to go through those and they're incorporated in a delegated act. They become part of European law and member states within Europe are currently transposing both the CSRD, the directive and the standards into their national laws and they had to the middle of next year to do that. So to the sort of number of my presentation, what are the differences? What, you know, we have these two now sets of standards. How are they different? So let me run through some characteristics and highlight some differences. So in terms of status, ICSB standards are voluntary. They need to be adopted by national government to make them law in a particular jurisdiction. Whereas in terms of the ESRS is their mandatory from 2024 or all EU companies and I'll go through the timeline in a minute. In terms of target audience, the ICSB standards are very much focused on investors. What information do investors need about sustainability to make decisions? So that is very much at the centre of the purpose of the ICSB standards. Whereas the EFRAG standards, the SRS is the focus is on a broader stakeholder group. And that brings us to this concept of materiality, which I'm going to touch on now, but I'll come back to under the ICSB standards, the focus is on single materiality. What aspects of a company's activities in terms of its financial performance would investors be most interested in when it comes to sustainability? Double materiality, which is the phrase that's used widely in Europe, looks at that, but also looks at what are the impacts, regardless of whether or not a company's activities have some sort of material financial impact on the business. Do they have a material impact on society at large? And in terms of the application of the standards, so it depends very much on the materiality assessment. So in terms of ICSB standards, you determine you, as in the company, determine whether or not the topics covered by the standards are material based on a materiality assessment, and that then opens the door in terms of what standard to apply. The same principle has been extended to the European standards, which has been seen as a kind of significant loss because initially the long list of 12 standards was that all of them were going to be required, and there was a rebuttable presumption that you had to apply the standards unless you could really provide good reasons for not. That's because of politics has changed, so ESRS 1 and 2 are mandatory, and all the other standards are subject to materiality assessment. The focus is sector agnostic for the ICSB, but they also have included the SASB standards, at least for now, to encourage companies to think about sector specific disclosures. So if you're in oil and gas, providing additional metrics to provide information about your business model. In Europe, we now move, we've got sector agnostic, we're now starting the work to look at sector specific, and at the moment, there's discussion of something like around 40 plus sector standards, which of course will be prioritised. In terms of the location of information, because the ICSB, as I said, has no legal power, it hasn't specified exactly where you locate this information, whether it's in a standalone sustainability report, or whether it sits in the financial filing. In Europe, it's much clearer. This must sit within the financial filing. So it sits alongside your financial statements. And the rationale there is that this is as important as the financial information in your financial statements, and therefore it needs to be given equal prominence. And then on the question of assurance, of having a third party coming in to check that this information is in fact true and fair, that it presents fairly, the activities of the company, there's no requirement under ICSB for assurance. In Europe, it's mandatory, initially at a limited level, moving to a reasonable level. So I'm not going to go into the technicalities unless people are interested in that, but suffice to say that a limited assurance just refers to work effort. So the assurance provider checks some things, but not everything, whereas reasonable assurance is a much higher level, which is then consistent with the financial statement ordered. So this is now the kind of kernel of double materiality, which is really, really important to grasp. And if you look on the left hand side of this diagram, you have what Victoria was calling business as usual, which is investors provide capitals to companies. In accounting, we call them reporting entities. In European law, they're called undertakings. And those companies prepare external reports, namely financial statements. And what goes into the financial statements are basically transactions that are considered financial in material. So in economic terms, that's what we call private costs. So we currently account for private costs. And if you look on the right hand side, there are all the different things that impact a company like nature, like its workforce, like the weather, like environmental issues, like pollution. So these all have an impact on the company. If it affects a company's financial bottom line, then the accounting takes account of those. If it doesn't, they're completely ignored. Now the real game changer in Europe is that companies not only have to do what they've always done, which is the left hand side. They also have to disclose their impacts or the social costs. So all those costs that business models for years and years and what we've taught students in business schools is to externalize as many costs as you can. So if labor is expensive in Japan, move your production to another geography where labor is cheaper, take advantage of the lower labor conditions so that you can increase your bottom line. And basically ignore the social effects, like there being child labor, like they're not being human rights observed, et cetera, et cetera. Ignore all of that because at the end of the day doesn't affect my bottom line. So here's the timeline and you'll all get a copy of the slides. These standards are not only relevant for European companies, but Japanese companies that have operations in Europe will have to start reporting against these standards from 2028. In terms of what do the standards cover? They cover environmental issues, they cover social issues, and they cover governance. And I don't have time to go through this, but there are topics, subtopics and sub-subtopics in the standard. So you can see the full range of issues that the ESRS is covered. And they're really quite comprehensive. So in terms of what's the solution? Well, at the Value Balancing Alliance, we've been looking at these developments and our focus is very much on how do we actually get companies to disclose their externalities. And so despite all these developments on reporting, we believe that there should be not only a financial statement, but there should be an impact statement. So if Mitsubishi Holding Company generates a profit of 100, what are the related externalities in generating that profit of 100 and actually tell us about them? That's not what this impact statement is attempting to do. It's trying to capture externalities upstream, own operations, and downstream. And yes, it's difficult. Yes, there are measurement issues. But unless we start actually making transparent the impacts companies are having on society, it is too easy to kick the can down the road and to say, oh, well, we're not dealing with this. Our board doesn't need to tackle this. Transition can be left for the next generation. And we know the closer we get to that transition point being a necessity, the more expensive it becomes. And so that's why we call on really reporting, not just to be this fragmentation of lots and lots of data points, but actually to collect it together and say, OK, you created this value, but you damaged this amount of well being. And so the net result is your business model is probably not so good for our society. And we need that information to be able to really strive for the purpose led organizations that Victoria was really challenging challenging us to think about. Thank you. Are you are you done? Yes. Okay, okay. Thank you. Okay, so I'm now I'll take over from you, Phillip. And I will introduce you to to go to your presentation on. So I'm the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Okay, so hello everyone and thank you again to Victoria and to Mario for these fantastic presentations and also for Hoshino sensei to set the stage and I'm actually maybe going to synthesize a little bit of what's been said previously. So, and see if we can actually outline a little bit. Maybe another way, or at least a complimentary way of thinking to all the movements that are going on globally that we've been working on here in Kyoto at the value research center. The place that I actually would like to start and is here in terms of the purpose of a company. And I'd like to actually jump into Milton Friedman and his 1970s article, where he basically argued that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. And he argued that basically the purpose of business like we've heard the business as usual sort of raised before. It's basically make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of society. So, as long as you don't break any major laws, make as much money as possible and everything else just like Mario is talking about can be externalized. But recently, 2019 Business Roundtable actually came out with a more nuanced view and said well wait a second, yes, maybe, but if we keep doing things the same way, then we actually may be polluting and harming future generations irreparably. So the purpose of the business now needs to shift to creating value for these seven different stakeholder groups. And so it includes the company itself its customers employees, partners society the planet, as well as shareholders and you can see very clearly in their purpose of a company, exactly how they're talking. And unsurprisingly out of the EU out of Europe, the World Economic Forum also came out with Davos Manifesto 2020 right about the same time, focusing again on the same exact seven stakeholders company, its customers, its employees partners society planet as well as shareholders. So we've got a this global view that's been coming out since 2019 or possibly earlier and I'm a marketing professor here at Doshisha and I'm proud to say that also the marketing world recognize that the Friedman model Friedman doctrine may have been a little bit wrong. And back in 2007 came out with an entirely new definition of what marketing was to talk about value creation across multiple stakeholder groups. So, the great thing about all of this is there's a lot of discussion about focusing on value creation for various stakeholders. But as we started to hear in the two earlier presentations, and we still don't have clarity on how exactly we're going to establish these thresholds and goals and so the SDGs definitely post or promote that big picture for governments. And basically, we have businesses also jumping in and committing to the sustainable development goals. But I want to introduce you to a quick problem that I see as a marketing professor, which is here's one company let's call them company and here in some of their disclosures that they're talking about they're highlighting all of these wonderful initiatives that they have underway related to the SDGs that it looks great right. But then what about these four that are missing. So they've got 13 there that they're focused on. What about those other four. So we can look at company and and again looks awesome. There's three very clear commitments to three sustainable development goals, but then what about these other 14. And then the question becomes, if we have everybody reporting or talking about their initiatives across a handpicked group of goals. What's the difference. How do we actually look at company and versus company and and make decisions about which one or which ones if it's a bunch of them are actually moving the dial in sort of comparison to others. Both Victoria and Mario have outlined this sort of alphabet soup of different ESG and sustainability reporting standards and frameworks. And there's honestly more than 150 I have heard recently there's more than 200, and they keep just growing. And so, again as a marketing professor in a global MBA program. I'm put in a very difficult position because if you allow me at my students to pick and choose what it is that good looks like. And then we also face the wrath of things here like from the Guardian, putting marketing and advertising at fault for all of climate change so it's, it's the marketers falls. So, if marketing has that much of an impact, then we also need exactly like Victoria was talking about the set of thresholds the set of goals, and also in a way that can be reported upon effectively exactly like Mario was talking about. So the question is, okay, then what is a good company that can help power global society forward to the best possible outcome. And we've already heard from Milton Friedman. So, out of Asia actually from China, we have a different philosophical view, starting from Confucian principles which actually separate profit and virtue if you're going to go after profit, you cannot be virtuous. So, you'll notice actually Japan started as sort of importing a great deal of thinking from China, especially Confucian principles, and the social hierarchy that got established hundreds of years ago. You can see that merchants are at the bottom, even though they may be economically well off, and they're socio in the societal ranking at the bottom, because again from Confucian philosophy, they can't be trusted. And one of the things, sorry, one of the things that jumped out at me was you start to see some very deep thinking from folks like Ishida Baigon back in the early 1700s, who said, well, wait a second. Actually, there can be this idea of fair profit. And obviously we're against this idea of unfair profit but if we have this fair profit concept, we can start to look at what good actually looks like in a business, even if it's a small one to start with. So, again, basically we have that evolving or sort of growing in parallel to this idea that has caught on a great deal here in Japan, this idea of Sampo Yoshi, which again started in 17th century Japan, this idea of three goods. So, where everything else was externalized in the Friedman doctrine, here we have a different view where in order to be good, a business needs to be obviously good for the seller, and good for the buyer, but also good for society. And basically from there, that thinking you can now see reflected in some of the new thinking that's coming out from the world here is service dominant logic, which is what I base a lot of my research on but this idea that a good company serves itself by serving others. And so, again, though, this all sounds good. But we bump right back up into Milton Friedman. And if you haven't read his 1970s article, I strongly recommend that you do because he actually called out a lot of these washing things that are happening right now, he called that out more than 50 years ago. And he said, these discussions of social responsibilities of business are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. And I think that's a theme in this session to that you're seeing we need to get rigor around these things. So when we talk about value, how do we measure it? I've defaulted to this idea of value is the sum of benefits minus the sum of costs. And if we think about it this way, value can be negative, we can also hurt people or hurt stakeholders, just as much as we can help. And again, if we put all of these stakeholders in sort of a circular view, we can see the firm and the decision makers at the center for these relationships, but they're in relationship with these six other stakeholders. And we can start to calculate those sum of benefits minus sum of costs, calculations across each of these relationships. So total value when we start thinking about it is value across each of these relationships in some. So the marketers job and the businesses job can start thinking about how do we optimize total value and for the entire set of stakeholders first. And then once we've got at least that under control, then how do we actually make it positive individually for each of these relationships and stakeholders. And so Yoshia Sugai, I've invited last year to this event, basically talks about this idea of boxing versus Aikido. So do you want to be at the center of this thing and beating up every stakeholder, or do you want to build up this concept called Serio Cuseno Jitakyoe, which she uses to teach this idea of bizdo. But this means all of our best energy for mutual prosperity. So we have an important philosophical decision to make his businesses. I've been schooled in the Friedman principle, I learned about externalities and sort of profit is the key to business success. But we also now are coming under the realization of all the negatives attached with thinking about things just as externalities. So we do have an important choice. And again, are these just words, a marketer and a marketing department and an advertising department can create beautiful stories with beautiful words. But can we match that with the actions that go with those words. So my question has always been, is there an analytically tight and rigorous measure for multi stakeholder value that can build on this philosophy of mutual prosperity and fair profits from Japan and Asia. And I can truly measure the value of the AMA Business Roundtable World Economic Forum and everyone else is talking about and measure this holistically across all stakeholders in a clear and consistent way. And I won't go into these details because it'll get a little too complicated but basically an end goal that I think may be out there for us comes from this gentleman named Robert Hartman and his idea of axiology. We're talking about value is infinite. If you think about any relationship that you have, you can always grow that value more and more, and it's all new opportunities are ever emerging. And so, if we have a future, maybe it's technologically enabled or whatever where each of those interactions can be measured, managed and constantly improved. If you see all of those impacts in real time. That's what Robert Hartman's view of the world was, and he used this calculus of infinity is to talk about it, which gets a little too complicated for me. But so basically, it's incredibly complicated what Hartman talked about. But if we think about technologies like blockchain AI distributed ledger technology, maybe can be used to accomplish that but in the meantime, we need a set of proxies to get close. And that's what I've been working on since 2016 and even earlier, but basically we've had three attempts the first one was trying to look at the academic literature. We looked at hundreds if not thousands of articles focused on value measurement. We tried to collect them put them into some standard model for value across stakeholders, it just failed miserably because the data, the analysis frameworks everything was just wrong. We failed. Next attempt was to look at the MSCI is the Sustainalytics the Bloomberg's that score companies on their sustainability efforts in hopes of finding that model but you reach a point where you can never get into the details of if plastic pollution declines by this this is how the score is impacted you can't get to the details that's proprietary, but that introduced us to all of these different frameworks that actually are public and we can start to look at them. And so basically we've gone through now for waves research we started back in 2020, where we collected impact measurements from 15 different frameworks. And basically what we did is we read every single one of them, and looked first to see if it aligned with what the business roundtable World Economic Forum we're talking about related to stakeholders and purpose. So we would read something like this GRI disclosure 202-1. It's talks about relevant ratio of entry level wage by gender so that's basically an employee focused stakeholder impact measurement. So that would go into the employee category, and we did that another 356 times across these 15 frameworks, and we had at the time a big Excel spreadsheet, but we found. Yes, what the business roundtable World Economic Forum we're talking about is supported by all of this data. And we also dug deeper to say what are the themes so that when we talk about measuring value some of benefits minus some of costs, what are the benefits what are the costs, and what are the themes that are related to them. So for example, value for employees is around diversity and equity, fair wages health welfare and safety development and training engagement satisfaction and human rights value for nature is around waste and pollution it's, and it's elimination of the stewardship energy products and services biodiversity and buildings and land. So basically we narrowed down to 27 themes that all of these different frameworks 15 at the time we're talking about. And then we went in and scored them to see how well they could fight against Milton Friedman's arguments about no rigor. And so we looked at whether or not these disclosure requirements had a goal attached to them. Could they be objectively measured, were their independent feedback loops that could check what companies were reporting or talking about, and did they scale was there some variation in the things that were being asked of them. So the highest scoring impact measurements from these different frameworks or standards would score five points, the lowest obviously would be zero. This very complicated Excel spreadsheet. But basically, our result was Milton Friedman was right 50 years ago, still, these frameworks are giving all of us all of these beautiful words without very clear end goals that can be measured independently by outside third parties. So there were no five point goals impact measurements and actually 95% of the ones that we looked at in this first wave were three or less points, which meant that we're still in that business as usual phase that Victoria was talking about earlier. So again, we mapped all of these against the different frameworks or standards to show how they were supported and who's talking about what, and then we dug deeper to talk about goals. So when we talk about value for nature waste and pollution what we mean is carbon neutral, zero non greenhouse gas emissions zero plastic pollution 100% waste reclamation recycling and zero sound and light disturbances. And if you're just talking about carbon neutral but forgetting about those other four, you're not seeing the overall big picture of sustainability and value impact, and we did that for each stakeholder, very clearly. So that now we've got a system that has seven stakeholders 27 themes 81 goals. And there's a range that come with a policy that a company can create and a practice goal to judge performance against and when they say hey, why are you saying that Philip, it's not me or my team that's demanding it but it's coming from these sources, and you can click in and go through why those exist there in the in the framework. So the idea is to get to this type of dashboard, not as a scoring mechanism the goal isn't to get a high score and 100 points and gold stars. The point is to actually come and create a forward looking strategy to achieve everything that we've been talking about here. So, again, we've gone through now three additional waves and wave to we added the planetary boundaries IFC TCFD ISSB and others. And basically our model stayed the same except we did tease out one goal around palm oil. That's now changed to 100% sustainable palm oil sourcing that basically ISSB had been asking companies to report on, but other than that, everything stayed the same. We actually started with the draft versions of the ESRS is out of FRAG, and we've now updated them to the latest standards that have been announced and also updated everything from our previous three waves up until today where we have nearly 40 now frameworks and standards, and more than 1000 impact measurements in our model, but it's still seven stakeholders 2017's 81 goals. And this value model is a new way to measure value created by a company and its stakeholders. It may not be the best version and I'm hoping that it can be used and improved upon. But the idea is to come up with proxies until we come up with a perfect solution. And the idea is for it to just keep growing. So it's based on a philosophy of fair profits and mutual prosperity from Japan and Asia. The idea is to integrate all of the world's greatest thinking and try to structure it in a way that anybody can work with these things, not just large multinationals. It comes with clear end goals with thresholds for each and KPIs that are derived exactly from the frameworks that we've looked at. And again, this should be forward looking to create strategy rather than backwards looking only to use for disclosure. So and one note is that it's created independently from any government business or trade body. We're not being paid to do this by anyone other than the kind of funding sources at Doshi University. So when we think about what comes after the SDGs in 2030, and even beyond the SG as it faces all of this political backlash in the US or maybe even globally, we need to think about value and we need to think about value for those different stakeholders. And we need to an accessible, clear, objective goal based model that doesn't allow the marketing department or the advertising department to spin the story away from the reality of impacts. Transparent by definition and it can be used by any size business. One thing we haven't gotten into so much yet, but is a reality of how the world's economies work is that upwards of 80 to 90% of the world's businesses are micro small and medium enterprises. And we can't just focus discussions on large multinationals. We need a system to focus everybody, all actions in the same vector in the same direction with those clear goals and thresholds. So again, we're offering this value model is some type of health checkup for any business. Again, it's not about gold stars and high scores. It's about of realistically checking where we are, how our strategy creates or destroys value, and then putting in the mechanisms in place to get to that ultimate purpose that Victoria was talking about previously, which is the long term well being for all. In my phrase that I used to use before speaking to Victoria was optimum value for all stakeholders and true mutual prosperity. But again, beyond the words this needs to be the purpose. So anyway, I'd like to thank you for letting me have this much time. And how to go, I will actually transition back over to you. And maybe I can actually stop sharing my screen. And I think I am perfectly on time. And I'd actually like to move over now to Dr. Hariko Sato, and basically talking about all of the conversations so far have been business focused. And how can we actually look at this through the lenses of geopolitics and policy, which I think is fundamentally important for the things that we do going forward as well. So how to go. Thank you. Thank you, Phillip. And good afternoon. And my name is Hariko Sato. And I also teach, or actually I teach at the Osaka School of International Public Policy at Osaka University. And I was formerly a colleague of Professor Hoshino, who just think he had to leave for his UN job. And I'm very much privileged to be for the second time round to participate in this science summit, which I think it's very stimulating for me, so it's very important. But I'm actually going to, well, I don't really want to throw in the spanners to what everybody's just the predecessors have just spoken about. But as Phillip has said, I am actually going to introduce a bit of the public sort of sphere public policy angle to SDGs and all the efforts that are being taking place to basically create a better world. And a sustainable future. But I'd like to start by two qualifications. First of all, I am probably the furthest away in specialty from any of the areas that my imminent speakers have spoken in the past hour and a half. I actually do international relations. So my specialty is the discipline itself is about how to prevent war, because our international system is essentially a system of war, and that's the way it works. And so, for me, the United Nations is a very interesting, progressive, an organization that tries at least to prevent war from having a sort of conflict from breaking out, and that any disputes between states could be resolved in an amicable or diplomatic manner. Of course, we are coming off the heels of some of the most controversial votes at the UN General Assembly. And we are now actually witnessing a very worrying fragmentation of this post 1945 institution. Nonetheless, and the other thing I actually wanted to to basically start off with as a qualification is to explain why I am actually here, not because just to present this other geopolitical point of view, but also to kind of deposit myself perhaps as an example of the kind of mindset that perhaps we would be useful for at least future generations or anybody who is listening right now, who's perhaps more interested in global governance affairs or environmental issues, or are very, very progressive about involved in one of these areas of SDG. That goes, but the point is that I wanted to start off with a story of myself when I was a school kid in the UK, partly because this actually has a significant bearing on the way that I might be sort of perhaps SDG literate, not so much out of my specialty, but because of the way that I was brought up, as well as the kind of education I received. So, this is really, I actually had, I did my own levels and a levels in in the British education system I grew up in the UK in the, and in went to boarding school basically. But I had a very progressive geography teacher, who actually, I believe had a doctorate from the University of Sussex at the time, from in development studies. I did my geography A level under her A level if you don't know what it is it's like the international baccalaureate but it's basically the last exam you take before leaving high school and before going to university. So it's pretty specialized, but her focus was very much as I said progressive to the extent that we were taught about she was basically talking about environmental degradation, about the sort of consequences of over development, desertification, acid rain, and the sort of the, the basically, and making us read books like Limits to Growth by Barbara Ward, or have us consult the documents from the the branch commission at Club of Rome, so on and so forth. And this was actually back in 1980, in the 1980s actually, I took my geography A levels in 1984. So this is really a good 40 years ago. And at the time, it was, it was very, very new, all of this world view about, for example, the the over urbanization in the UK or in other parts of the world that were going going through rapid economic development was shocking to to watch the amount of the environmental degradation or pollution. They were all also shocking. But one thing I realized. And I think we all shared in the classroom was that the world looked pretty grim. The future did not look very promising if we kept on at this pace. And, but at the same time it was during the Cold War. And one of the things that I still remember to this day is feeling very perplexed and worried that the United States and the Soviet Union at the time, and the rest of the world really were producing thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons, pouring a lot of money on defense on military equipment on arms and so on and so forth. While you you think like well but you know shouldn't they spend a bit more on these environmental issues or development issues. The question actually still remains, I think, fundamental in the way that I look at, and I sort of place where these global sort of issues come into place where it competes with other national priorities such as, and as I said, in the system of war, the primary actor is the state, the nation state and the primary responsibility of the nation state is to protect and secure the state itself so national security as you perhaps notice is extremely important it is like the paramount policy priority for any state. In my discipline which is international relations basically when we look at the issues that are being spoken about and addressed very much today. We consider them as not so much the companies, but we treat private sector these multinationals, for example, as non state actors. These would also include some of the large international non governmental organizations. We call them theoretically they are non non state actors, and some of the implications of climate change or environmental degradation or poverty, all of these things as non traditional security threats. So, unfortunately, in this lexicon of security policy or international relations, there is, of course, this does not mean that this, there is no sort of hope for actually sort of thinking about of not prioritizing these non traditional security issues. But the same time, they do, as I said, compete as a nature of the international system itself with these other national security sort of the traditional security priorities, such as defense, such as territorial integrity, such as in this net and so forth. So, as you can imagine, during the Cold War, the world was obviously ideologically divided into two. And what kept the bipolar system was this enormous, enormous sort of armed sort of confrontation of this mutual assured destruction system of nuclear weapons facing from the Soviet Union and United States facing each other. So, but at the same time, as my geography teacher basically sort of enlighten us in and warned us of the future about how things could be. If something is not done, if we are not aware of these problems and do something to address them, then never mind nuclear war, the earth will be unsustainable. Climate itself would, you know, face catastrophe and humanity would suffer as a consequence. At the time you could call that this is very leftist or progressive, but I have to say that at an impression or age of being a teenager, it did leave a huge impression on the way that I looked at the world and I looked at politics and I looked at, for example, projecting the future. Of course, I didn't go into the job of actually pursuing this or choosing a job to address these issues, but instead I went into more sort of political philosophy, international relations and so on and so forth. But I do feel that when I graduated from university and I went to graduate school and I saw the first Rio conference on development in 1992 when the Cold War ended, I thought, oh, there's hope. There is hope because finally the world is paying attention to development issues, to environmental issues, to climate issues, all of these things and I thought, oh, this is very good. This might be the sort of transformative to this international system, which is essentially about a system of anarchy and basically a competition between nation-states survival. And as I said, the United Nations is very much key to actually offering a platform for this different types of relations between states that allow for cooperation, collaboration, policy coordination. If you think about, for example, the speed with which the world developed the COVID-19 vaccine, that is a champion of international collaboration. And likewise, the efforts that are taking place, for example, in the standards, for example, the all the stuff that's been talked about previously, these are also about a very important international sort of manifestation of possibility of international cooperation and coordination and the mutual sharing of global goals. However, and this is where I really need to sort of say that I actually ever since the war in Ukraine, never mind COVID, but the war in Ukraine, I just feel that perhaps the world is kind of slipping back to the time when the ideological division really kind of rendered also the United Nations impotent. It was really very, apart from discussing these global environmental concerns from the 70s and into the 80s, it really couldn't do anything about implementation. And if the end of the Cold War brought ushered in an era of, say, possibility of where the United Nations occupies the center stage to lead the way in addressing these common global concerns. Then in recent years, and particularly, as I said, of this particular General Assembly, if the United Nations is so divided, and then geopolitics actually unfortunately comes into play from, say, energy policies from green energy transition and the scramble for rare metals, all of these things all come into play, but they all need, at the same time, they feed into the nation state competition, but we hope that these also would be mitigated, mediated so that people get to share these scarce resources for the betterment of humanity. However, I do really feel that we are at this crossroads, very difficult crossroads where the political landscape, international political landscape is also entering an era of, as you probably have heard, a sort of a kind of a division between the global north and the global south, and the ownership, the increasing demand for ownership of their future and destiny by the global south is very, very serious. And so I don't really want to sort of complicate the picture anymore, but I just wanted to say that this is where I think the reality is that how, you know, in order to have what Victoria and Mario and Philip have discussed and presented in terms of the efforts and also the challenges that face, even on the sort of the SDG goals, there is I think also, we need to also be mindful that it also, the private sector, as Professor Hoschner says, when the business is changed, yes, actually it is a huge agent for change, but at the same time there really needs to be, sorry, sorry, I think that we also are at least since the war in Ukraine in a very critical juncture in international politics where these efforts in the private sector may not actually be implemented because of the competition of and also the rivalry and the fragmentation of international politics at not just the United Nations level, but also in the regional level. And I am just really hoping that this won't be the case. But in any case, the justice say the final word is that for me, I happen to actually be interested and be informed and very caring about what happens on these global issues, but my colleagues and most of the people that I work with, as I said, we treat this as non-traditional security issues and we actually also do need to converse. There needs to be a better conversation between the disciplines, between and sharing the lexicons and also sort of do more sort of interdisciplinary dialogue between these issues that are done, particularly with the business school level and then the political science level, international relations, anthropology. Otherwise, I think we are also pigeonholing ourselves into talking in sort of different languages when we all sort of see the same thing and not communicating well. But also, finally, I think, if my, I think the future generation and I think it really would be helpful if at some global effort could be made for primary school or secondary level education to have a more sort of rigorous and informative education about these global issues, because I think having a mindset that warns us and be realistic and to cherish the well-being of the planet, I think, has been very, very useful for me and I think this clearly has to be a lot more useful for the future generations. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much, Haruko. And thank you to all of our speakers. And we have a very short break put into the schedule. And I'm thinking maybe because most everybody's cameras are off, I'm thinking that everybody may have stood up and stretched their legs in between different talks. So I'm not sure in terms of speakers, Victoria, Mario, and Haruko, would you like to actually jump into the panel session or should we, yeah, why don't we jump into the panel. And we can always end a couple minutes earlier if that's okay. Heather, is that acceptable as well? Yeah, okay. So Haruko, if I can actually turn the panel session over to you. Each of us has now given our own sort of views of the world in this space. And this next section is trying to sort of weave these together and sort of have a dialogue between all of the speakers, just to see if we can net out at a better place. And so Haruko, if you wouldn't mind running and moderating this panel session, I will gladly turn it over to you. Okay, so how should I, all right. Sorry for my blabbermouth. I hope. Okay, so I will turn to the panel session and we basically would like to invite the three speakers, Mario, Victoria and Philip, to discuss basically two sets of questions. First of all, talking about the focusing on what Victoria first presented about the ultimate purpose and the philosophy. So, and this will actually I think we should we could start with perhaps five minutes each of five or 10 minutes each of commentary from questions from starting with, well, actually, we're starting with actually Mario and then go to Philip and then finally Victoria. Does that make sense? So Mario. Thanks, Haruko. I think on purpose it's, you know, the whole idea of what's the purpose of the corporation. I think as Victoria said, we kind of have to restore our memories, our kind of broken memories of why corporations were set up in the first place. And corporations were never intended to be separate from the society in which they operate. It's become a way we've changed our thinking influenced by the thinking of Friedman and the interesting thing there is to go back to Friedman's book in 1963, which I have capitalism and freedom. And in this book, it's very illuminating because really, the issue and this ties back Haruko to what you were saying. His big concern, his big motivation is, is not about markets for market's sake. It's really the concept of freedom. And he was responding to, you know, the scourge of communism and, you know, what what that was doing. And, you know, the loss of personal freedom. So what Friedman was trying to solve for was how do we prevent the state taking over, which is a very different problem to the one we're trying to to solve today. So I think it's important to kind of anchor back to Friedman was trying to use economics, using that lens of economics. So how do we solve the issue around personal liberty? And how do we maintain that kind of libertarian view of the world? And I think that became enshrined. And the issue in terms of what Friedman was trying to solve for has, in fact, kind of moved on. But the economic system hasn't moved on. And so the economic system is not actually solving the problems we're facing today. And I think that's why we really need to question and challenge the whole raison d'etre of why do we have companies? And what are those companies for? And I think there's often a danger here where people will say, Okay, we understand what you're saying about purpose. But surely businesses need to be viable. Businesses need to be profitable. Because isn't that what market capitalism is all about. And I think the point I would make there is, yes, a business does need to have enough cash coming in to pay the bills and all of that. But that's not the only reason to exist. It's not just that kind of subsistence of the business that we should really focus our gaze on. It's really how is this business actually improving well being, and what's happening to all those costs that are being externalised? Because as an accountant, you know, I know somebody's going to pick up the check somewhere along the line. And that's what we're seeing with nature. We've externalised all these costs. And now we have to pay, we have to pay the bill. And the question is, who pays the bill? And do we move to conflict? Which is unfortunately one of the kind of terrifying scenarios to kind of avoid paying the bill. So let's protect us. Let's protect our communities. And let's lock out all the foreigners. Let's lock out all those that could have to share in our well being and potentially move, you know, move our standards down. Or do we actually try and reorientate this system so that rather than having to resolve these will not resolve but kind of distract from the real purpose. And she said, okay, well, maybe there are some business models out there that don't actually add any value that externalising so many costs, if you think about the tobacco industry. And we've known for a long time, the tobacco industry in terms of their value added if you want to take even a fairly, you know, basic measure like that. It's been negative for a long time. And once you add in the, the externalities, it becomes very negative. The food system is worth 12 trillion. US dollars. So if you have all the companies in the world, and you know, the value, economic value they generate 12 trillion. Once we add in all the externalities of being fed ingredients that make us eat more, that lead to malnutrition in some countries, and obesity in others. And so in the UK, for example, healthcare costs are spiraling out of control because of the cost of obesity. You end up with a negative extraction of 2 trillion. So with the food system, 12 trillion positive. Once we take out the externalities, we end up with a negative figure of 2 trillion US dollars. Surely that's not right. Who's going to pick up that? And at the moment, our healthcare systems are all breaking because the health, the government cannot pay that amount. So we need to go back to the root cause and say, sorry, but you can't use these ingredients in food anymore. Because yes, we had a problem where we increased food production and we could sell more food. And that's what our marketing colleagues did very successfully. We now have to stand back and say, well, okay, but in terms of value, we're actually destroying value. So we need to pivot away from that and think about how do we correct for this situation? Because if we don't course correct, we're just going to end up in the nightmare scenario. You're suggesting, which is not suggesting, but we're seeing play out before us, which is global conflict. And how's that good for any of us? So I think we should see this as a very sobering, you know, the secretary general's call, but only 15% of SDG targets. These are targets that all the governments around the world agreed to. There was consensus. This is what sustainability is all about. And yet only 15% achieved and a lot of them are going in reverse. You know, either we get serious about this or it's kind of game over. It's unfortunately that kind of existential cliff that we're standing on at the moment, and I don't want to be alarmist, but hey, look around. I'll stop there. Okay, thank you. And fill it. Okay, so if I can build on that upbeat answer. So basically, yes, I completely agree. And I think we, I think all of us have been hitting on a very similar theme, this idea of sort of first principles and what is a business, like, why is it there. And I think again, some of the things that I've been presenting earlier, this idea of the mindset behind that business and the society that it's embedded in. And is this there for this idea of mutual prosperity is this there for actually exactly what Victoria was talking about that that ultimate purpose right, or is it there for something else. And I think one of the points we haven't touched on but it would be really interested to really dive into at some point maybe in the future is this idea of power and whose perspective we actually are listening to, actually carries the day, because again from a business standpoint from a PR or marketing, whatever view, as long as you can get your story across and to have that play, then you may be able to win. And that misses the larger discussion about impact. And for me, the exciting thing that's sort of coming right now is this idea of whether it's material or not. Whether actually we pay attention or not whether it's external or not in your view from your power in the discussion, the impacts are happening. And we're at the point now that we can't ignore them. So even though we've got some Mario you introduced the single materiality and double materiality, we still don't have the viewpoint of this stakeholder in the equation. It's just that the power is with the company to through its lenses to say its impact, not a reflection back many times from what the stakeholder is saying and I think that is a key thing here that if we're, if we are focused on this mutual mutual prosperity, this this greater good for everyone as best as possible, that to really understand that the respect for all of the voices in the room and the accounting of all of those is a really critical piece. So, again, that that would be my sort of take on that. And maybe I turn it back over to Victoria, but the, yeah, that would be my take. Thanks, Phillip. Yeah, the question of purpose. We have to, I mean purposes about your fundamental intent and embedded in that is the idea of purposefulness. So it isn't just purpose dictionary definition it's purposeful in terms of being other oriented. So when we talk about those mindsets that Philip was alluding to that's why that triangle reveals the fundamental worldviews and mindsets around what an organization and this is beyond the business I think we firstly need to recognize that I've done an analysis with a colleague on universities for example they're in the middle of the triangle by all objective measures. We could say the same about government do we have purpose driven government, not just in terms of what we think their intent is but how they're governed and managed so this is what really matters. So those logics are absolutely vital in us having empathy and understanding about the nature of the barriers, and therefore the ability to unlock those barriers, but those logics set out within that triangle also really reveal in the mechanics, the mechanics of why, because you can't expect an organizations whose goals are financial optimization and whose goals that we govern for in terms of law, the hard law are centered around financial stocks and flows. Why would we expect anything else to come out of it. Why would we expect anything other than lobbying co option because we've said, optimize your profits. So if we don't start from that position we're just fooling ourselves. And what we've seen over the last 20 years is a history of cultural appropriation of any efforts to solve these issues into that logic but why wouldn't we. I mean it's like it's an obvious consequence. And so, in very technical terms we need to get real from all levels down. So we all need to be speaking the same language of governance here that we need to be clear about the goal. We need to anchor the goal, we need to create law that tells us that as organizations, we need to exist for a contribution to a sustainable future or the outcome of an effective economy the same thing. And that in doing whatever we want to do the innovation within that we are subject to these hard constraints now I'm going to change my word goal for it because it gets the problem is and this is why I think 99% of people are confused about what strategy is. There are two reasons firstly, because when you have an optimal goal that's profit maximizing and everyone assumes it's the case. The goal the objective the ultimate objective is not even a conversation because it's just implied. So strategy becomes the thing you're anchoring to and of course that's just moving around markets, it depends who the latest CEO is. So, in a purpose driven approach, we start to be clear about this difference between objective and I'm going to use the word objective not goal, because of the global goals, which ultimately when they become manifested in an organization actually our parameters. And I think we need to just be really clear about saying these are parameters, they're not goals in the decision making sense of it, because, and you know what it's goal, it's constraints that are the lifeblood of innovation. So if we say, but the problem is if we're saying to an organization optimize for all stakeholders as your reason to exist. That is not, that's not how we operate in organizations it's not how business but all organizations operate, because we need to be clear. We have to make a decision now what is the thing we're trying to make happen that we're going to feel good about at the end that's our definition of success. If it's every single thing ever for everyone, it's not possible and the problem is while we maintain that narrative, the people who don't get this who are arguing for the middle of the triangle say oh that's just not workable, and I agree it's not workable. So yes, all stakeholders forever is the ultimate meta purpose, but as soon as you bring it into any organizational unit it is specific set of stakeholders potentially, or a specific problem like climate change which is automatically all stakeholders. But regardless of that regardless of the purpose which we definitely need to be governing for make very clear, it has to be delivered within these thresholds, and that's the bit we need to double down we need to be separate them very consistently, and then be clear what these thresholds are so I love what the value at work you're doing, Philip to really say, these are clear thresholds, and we need consensus science based and stakeholder based, because let's face it when we're saying consensus over what's the right living wage. In order to a chain a certain kind of outcome from someone in a certain country, that is a normative decision. Even hard parameters that are science based are normative decisions ultimately, and this is where we need stakeholder conversations. But once they get into the organizations they need to be governed as hard parameters, and we shouldn't be afraid of that and I'm just end on one thing to say, because then we make the market economy our friend. When people are talking about get rid of capitalism, I find this really sad and profits a bad thing we need to liberate the market economy and liberate profits for the kind of freedom that ultimately freedom was trying to talk about. Because the market, if it works well, and is is focused on achieving long time while being for all people and planet, we can efficiently move resources around who wants to be told every single thing that they can buy and exchange, I'd say, almost nobody. And so the question then is, are we actually drowning people in betting on horses and essentially trying to plug the gaps, because we are in the middle of the triangle and it has all of these negative effects that come out of it. We are going to drown ourselves if we try and solve the problem with the old mindset, as Einstein said, we have to have to clarify this so that we can then say, because that's one thing that purpose and governance have done well will do. They'll set the big frame, and we can get rid of a lot of the red tape. We can say as long as you're achieving this goal, and you tell us how you're doing it will judge whether the intention is good. You know, let's have a normative conversation. Then you say what strategy you're going to deliver it with, and you're going to assure us that you have done this within these parameters. Now everything else is up to you because actually it doesn't matter. And that's where you start to unite the world, because you realize that what you're arguing about is strategy. In other words, how do we meet the goal within parameters, whereas we all think we're arguing about the goal and the parameters and actually, I don't think we are. Is it possible for me to add a follow on to that? May I jump in and maybe take that as a rule that we can all sort of build on each other's discussion. But I mean, I think it's spot on. And I think exactly like you're talking about, as long as we take the washing element out of it, instead of trying to convince the world that we're great at everything and that we're the world's best, regardless of whether it's an individual business, an economy, whatever it is, that to have those benchmarks to say this is the strategy that we've chosen. And these are the stakeholders that we're choosing to work on. And because of that, these are the other things that we're not paying attention to. And as long as we understand that holistic big picture, then we actually let the market move, right? The market actually has a really important function to play there. Because then we're not lying to each other or trying to avoid the issue. We actually can see the full picture. And I think that's sort of one of the driving things behind the work that we're doing here is that, you know, enough of the marketing happy talk and enough of the fluff and all of that stuff. Okay, we understand you're all doing great, but let's put that in a common context. And once we have that common context that the world can agree to, then it's up to companies and businesses or whatever economies to compete on. And that's when it gets exciting. So I hope that's adding and not subtracting from what you said, but I think that context and this push towards getting the highest score. And I talk about the value model and half of my recent conversations have been trying to just explain that it's not about getting 100% across each of these goals. That's impossible. The point is to actually be able to benchmark where you are right now to see it on the grand scale, and then think about improving, right? And one little thing which is to say, you know, I completely agree. I would say the thing is, if we're talking about minimum thresholds of healthy systems, they need to just it's not a pick and choose list. You know, and this is why one Mario talked about the move to materiality adjustment. I mean, what do we really mean by what's material, if we're all degrading a certain ecosystem just a little bit. I think that that system is not going to collapse. Of course it is they all matter, which is where again the difference between this is a minimum bar that if we don't get there we're all stuffed versus this is now you're actually in the EU law is like this pick one to go further on and my question would be so you're going to optimize for that like to what level are you going to take, you know, resources from other places to do that. And it's that bridge, the bridge between the big stuff and the decision making logics that I think we need to lean into and we have everything we need to do. I just asked a very layman question, because I agree very much that, you know, you should have more faith as so to speak in capitalism and the market. But what are the political cost of trying to get to what you are all talking about of the one that actually works for all of us when we have this obscene number of billionaires who are actually now beginning to have serious political influence and in some cases like Musk and his stalling. Sometimes some strategic implications. I'm not trying to be sort of I'm throwing the spanner again but it is I think that this there's an issue about how this Western led capitalism works and has reached a certain point of perhaps out control, you know when there's more money flowing than the actual economic sort of product measured in any substantial terms, right so there's that money stuff. But then we also have then the totally in some ways, unaccountable other types of say like Chinese or you know Russian or Brazilian companies that are not exactly sort of going along with even the basic financial regulations of these other European or US or Japanese or Korean companies. So I am just wondering about the sort of impact on politics the political leadership, how do you rein these in in a way that we get to that place where it works for everybody. Yeah, I think I think that's a great challenge you've you've given us I think there is a big question around distribution, because I think not only is that in terms of production and you know the externalities there. It's also the distribution of wealth of income that is absolutely critical in kind of re engineering the system. And I think that's totally broken and if you think you know kind of what are some of the justifications for that. Again, it takes us back to this fixation on profit maximization. So the reason we can justify paying a CEO, you know millions and millions, if not hundreds of millions is the agency problem. You know, we've convinced ourselves that unless you pay the agent a large amount of money, they won't act in the interest of the principal in the interest of the shareholder. And therefore, we need to pay them these exorbitant amounts of money and I think the system is completely flawed and I think you can look at, you know, what makes money. It motivates the great CEOs around the planet. And it's not money. And I think, you know, this, this distribution issue where you know if people don't, if people encounter problems in their lives, it's their fault. And the system punishes them. So either you succeed using the kind of formula that's been given or else you don't and you become marginalized. And I think that's what's feeding a lot of the political unrest and the divisiveness in in in global politics, but also national politics, you know, in the UK, within Europe, where you see this kind of, you know, very simplistic world view being espoused by the far right that, you know, somehow well being will be improved if we just lock everybody out. And we can return to the past. And as Bruno Latour used to say, you know, we can't go back there. We can only go forward. So we need to decide how do we want to go forward. This kind of nostalgia for the past that actually never existed. But you know, it's all the kind of myth making that goes around how we construct all the logic and apparatus that sits around our economic system and so it allows for these huge inequalities to flourish. Maybe I could just add something in there. That's okay, Philip, unless you wanted to just to say that for me, the answer to that question is who he goes clarity and consensus, because I do believe there is enough energy in the system to make this happen. There's enough awareness now. We have, we might call it different things. And I think that that comes back to what I'm about to say. But if we imagine the latent energy in the system people trying to do something but not have quite the right language or the quite form, or people who were really engaged but now I've given up a little bit but could get engaged again or people who are just waiting to understand or all the vast youth who are invested in this. I think the goal is to unleash that in but we can't unleash it unless we're clear, and we have an accountability frame that therefore we can work with, and therefore clarity of what we already to know to be true is the first thing. And my work over the last 21 years I can say that that consensus I think is waiting to just be crystallized which is why I work with ISO, because it's not perfect in terms of being fit for purpose but it is the best most developed multi stakeholder consensus process that we have as a facility for the world that doesn't come with yet you know the level of vested interests and kind of gatekeeping. So let's make it work for us. Let's do that. And so that's the way that we can get the clarity and the consensus because everyone in theory if we make it work for us is invited to that table. No one should be excluded because you can work through your national member so what does that look like and we're potentially purpose will go to ISO level next year, and I think that's a catalyst moment to actually put that into action. So whether you're an individual whether you're an NGO whether you're a company whether you're a government, this is the place that we can bash out that clarity that we need. And then, so that's what I would say, because otherwise how can we hold to account because yes we have the billionaires. Yes, we have a rule of law that's not working so well but if we were to flip that and say what do we have, well we have semi working nations, you know, ISO has 164 of them with member bodies that are sort of aligned you know we have a lot of resources if we think about what we have to work with. I think we just need to unleash that in a positive way, so we can achieve what we all want to, because otherwise I think we're going to be our IP confusion bureaucracy, you know, our IP humanity and life on earth and that would just be really sad to go that way. I agree because I think it's, if you think about it from the 60s, I mean the world has come really really far to even get to the MGGs and SDGs and there's some serious hope. And it's just so sad at the moment that for example the United States and China can't even talk to each other which is sort of shows you the amount of responsibility that they feel for anybody. But I agree, I agree, that's a very forceful sort of way of putting hope, I think. And if I can add one quick point and just, again, if the default is, again, if the default is thinking about value and value for all members of that system, then irrespective of the politics, irrespective of the market, the mindset, whatever is driving it, if we can see the value for those stakeholders and the impacts. And then obviously I asked the question, what's a good company, but I mean I think maybe related to the question you just asked, what's a good country. And I mean, obviously the same dynamics should be playing, which is optimizing prosperity, right, mutual value for everyone as best as possible than independent players in that system are there to help promote that. But we probably know if we can see the impact and the value outcomes that happen, we already know the answer for what we should be doing to improve that overall value in that system. I'm not sure if I'm truly answering the question, but I've found in multiple situations that if we default to thinking about value and really truthfully accounting for impacts, then I think a lot of the answers already present themselves quite clearly. A tiny little build, Philip, if you wouldn't mind if you would just very tiny, but it's an example you use the word prosperity and, and it's just in it I just want to use it as an example. When we talk about value and we talk prosperity, if we ultimately mean well being and we have consensus on what what that means, then we can hold ourselves to account in that moment you know I say to people get lost in all of this stuff I say if if you bring it down to saying will this decision likely increase the long term well being of everybody or not you have at least some framework to work with right. As soon as we say things like prosperity and value the problem is everyone brings their own view and prosperity can mean well obviously and this is what happened with the round table. We stated the end goal of the economy, which was prosperity for all Americans, which is the problem of course because in a zero sum game where your goal is finances a proxy for well being is purchasing power parity you're just trying to get one level and that's why the economy has to expand right, but ultimately they only said, we need to basically increase the well being of all Americans forever that's the goal of business I mean that that's not new. That is the goal within a nation state of the economy, but what they didn't then say is, and we've changed our assumptions about how best to do that. So when we say prosperity we could just mean that we think and actually that's what they did then do is say, and we think the best way to do that is to make as much money as possible because, and then all the assumptions around the neoliberal version of the economy. So it's that level of precision that we need in our language in order to be able to move through I think it's almost not as not not bigger or smaller than that actually. It's a great. I think it's. Yeah, I think it's one of the things that you mentioned Victoria about measuring countries strength by GDP. I think really needs a serious review. This is where some of the, the skewered ways of measuring even your own country or the well being, I think really gets a bit misleading and leads to some wrong policies, I think. But anyway, thank you so I'm. Sorry, sorry, but I just come in on one point there. I think we need to, I think part of the problem is, we can't solve for global inequality we can't solve for these huge political problems what we need to do is actually go to the root cause. And the root cause is we've accepted that you can run a company generate create all sorts of income inequality generate all sorts of environmental effects and walk away and you don't. There's no accountability for that. And I think that's where we need to hold the mirror and say yes you made a profit. But you also created all these other problems. And I think the more visible we make those impacts. I think the easier it is for the politics to shift in terms of understanding what's got to change. Otherwise we all default to yes but not for me I don't want to change for you know how it is for my family or my situation. Let the next person do it. And we've got to stop passing the parcel. And just a tiny thing to say is why marketing comes in as well because marketing at its best reveals the true value. And so the people are willing to pay a price because they don't think they're only getting this value they realize they're getting this value. So that level of clarity around minimum conditions and what extracting below that looks like and then marketing bringing that to life. This is why I always say governance and marketing if there are two functions in an organization that we need to get right it's those because one sets the decision frame and the other one creates and communicates and builds the value that sits within it. So I'm on your as you know, Philip. I can add one on top of that and I showed a little dashboard that we've sort of been working on. And again it's not the best and it's a little cumbersome still. But this idea of having that. Instead of thinking that we can evaluate on. I mean I think that's fundamental and then disclose the thing that bothers me is that the end thinking always is on the disclosure and not on the value. Right created. And I think the decision. Right. So if we think that if we switch the thinking that the disclosure is just an update on where we've come so far, but we've got this overall strategy related to all of these issues. Then we actually have a model that can work and I think again part of this discussion is about sort of what comes 2030 or 2031 as the SDGs evolve or reach their limit. And I personally think all the things that we've been talking about amongst the four of us are some of the key inputs that may need to be really communicated and thought deeply about because as good as the SDGs are and as good as the MDGs were we're still in the position that we're in today. And so how can we leverage the discussions that we're having today to actually help build that future thing that generations to come actually will say well at least they started to get things right back, you know back then. So anyway, back back over to you. Well, I think we can sort of thank you for the segue and we can move to the second question of the second point about particularly its focuses on what Mario talked about, but also in a way that it points to the board of thinking about the post 2030 post SDGs what what will be the the challenges to take a ways and so on but I would like also if you have time just to look at the question that we have in the the chat column there's an interesting question that I thought would be the issue marker small as beautiful still relevant to this discussion, which I thought was. Just to bear in mind that we have very three questions from one of the participants, but so here we go now we will go start with Victoria. Yeah, so I suppose just summarizing briefly I agree with what Philip said I think these are not separate questions, you know the SDGs are not separate from the question of ESG they're not separate I mean everything is all related. Ultimately there's a real reality playing out that we are not in control of and so much I hear the sort of the sort of it's not feasible or pragmatic it's like what this sort of abstract view of feasible and pragmatic that we've kind of created for ourselves as we feel more comfortable, or is this the real pragmatism based on the real reality and this is the bridge that we need to divide. So I agree I think the UN has done amazing work, especially in that leap to SDGs. It can be transitionary. It was it was already took a massive leap. It, it had it did what it could in relation to business as usual, and the lack of clarity that was out there in order to be able to set it up for success. So I think we've had the period of time that the SDGs have existed have been in the context of that opaqueness, and just butting up against barriers at every level of the system for everything that was in that triangle. And I think if the SDGs the next version, we don't have time to not just grasp the nettle to leapfrog to the end game, we just don't have time I think we all agreed on that. And we know what the end game looks like. And we have the tools to do it and we have the solution and we have the energy. So, yes, there are some serious ballot barriers in terms of business as usual. But if we can call it a name, if we can know how it operates, even for ourselves, you know, it's not like we have some of us who are outside of it some of us, we're all subject to it. We all find ourselves slipping into that narrative, or slipping into it because we want to make people feel comfortable, because we like to be liked in the moment and sometimes it just comes down to that. Again, that's why this clarity is so important. So I would really urge the UN and everybody who is engaged in what this next version is going to be to take seriously what we were presenting today, because I think it, I think what we're saying is not. I speak for the others, they can say it's not our ideas, you know, we're not saying, oh, this is a, you know, this is like, we have the luxury as academics, academics between academia and practice to be able to reveal that which people who are in the day to day to day chaos don't have the ability to articulate. So let's lean on what we have, and, and, and bring it to clarity so that that would be my, my message on the SDGs on the SMEs. Again, and I hope that's come through from what I've said, this, this synergy of aligning decision makings, making with a sustainable future, because those decisions are aligned with a goal of long time while being for all people and planet within those parameters. Every organization in every country in every place. I saw 37,000 on governance was written for any organization from what an organization of one to the biggest largest organization in the world from the Catholic Church to any kind of charity you can imagine. Everyone is at this table, the principles of aligning decisions with a sustainable future apply to everyone. Yes, then we need examples and help to put this diamond in the center, the bit that pins down the key concepts that that bit is the bit that we need to get right and then we can pull it out and that's where the SDGs have a massive role to play. Did it. So, I don't know how I follow that. That's great. Basically, basically, I would urge everyone thinking about what comes after the SDGs to go back and reread Milton Friedman's 1970 article on the social responsibility of a business, because in it. He outlines very clearly, and sort of the rules for overcoming this thinking, right, and basically, his argument is one about, and one there's no analytical rigor, and so we need a system that's rigorous. And two, he outlines this idea of washing right so I just published an article on value washing. And it's, it's very clear if you make things so complex that nobody understands what we're talking about, then anything and everything is good. Right, and it just matters how big your bully pulpit is. So we need to remove that idea of complexity. And so that hits on the point that was raised in the question about SMEs. It needs to be doable for a micro enterprise. This isn't, it's, it's common sense and I mean what we're finding and looking at now 30 and maybe it'll be 50 and maybe by next year it'll be 100 different frameworks everybody's basically saying similar things. We need to simplify that and make it accessible. And how to go you hit the point about education. I mean, even to make it so simple that a first grader can understand. Because if a first grader can understand that a first grader can help us and sort of chart the future for when they become, you know, champion of whatever company or whatever part of government or whatever. And I think that, again, remove the complexity and remove the washing, right, the ability to wash, and let's get into the reality of the situation. And let's make our decisions from that basis. And the minute that we can make our decisions from that basis. All the good can start to flow right and everybody's everybody's passion and innovation and everything can flow. We're caught up in everything else. Again, freedom was very clear on this. And for all the negative things that I say about him. I have to say some positives to which he was very clear on saying what's wrong with all the things we're saying. We don't fix those we're never going to be able to fight against the 1970s or Mario is talking about a 1963 approach or way of thinking. It's the 20, we're 2024 almost right and we should be thinking about right the summit for the future and what it is that we're doing. Why are we still fighting with a 1970s argument, it's ridiculous. So, if we can actually get over that sort of those issues of washing and removing the complexity from this. I think we've got a bright future. So, and it's one that an SME must be able to understand and implement, just as well as a large multinational corporation. So, that's that's my try to follow up to Victor is an incredible point. So, Mario. Yeah, if I could come in on that so starting with the question which I think is a very pertinent one that there's a danger in all of this that it becomes a code for the elite. But this becomes the whole SDG project is something for, you know, large corporations or whatever. It's difficult for the SMEs, which are really the engines of all of our economies. Most of most people work, they work in an SME, not in a multinational. So, we need to somehow make sure that we create a language post 2030 that speaks a business logic and is not can't be separated as easily as the SDGs can be today. Because you can say, oh, we're not into sustainability. That's not one of our priorities. So, no, that's go to the next place. And I think that's where we need to shift governance from governance being a sort of compliance exercise to governance really pivoting to an accountability exercise. That's where I make my pitch for the finance department being the most important department in the corporation. But on a serious point, we need financial discipline that we have with allocating financial budgets. Well, what about carbon budgets? You know, what about all these things, all these things that are issues, we actually know in management accounting terms, how to fix these problems. So, you know, you allocate budgets. So, okay, so if it's gender diversity, well, let's set up a realistic budget and set targets throughout the corporation in terms of, you know, what outcomes we actually want. So what constitutes well being, and then let's apply the same attention that we give managing our expense budget or managing our sales for the month to these other targets as well. Because at the moment, when you talk to people in business and the kind of academic space that we all occupy is that they say yes, but the problem is our performance management is all geared around our profit targets. So, yes, we're totally convinced we all heart and soul are into these sustainability goals. But at the end of the day, when it comes to the crunch, my performance is to deliver my profit. So I'm going to retrieve to short term thinking within a narrow, narrow financial construct. And I think that's what we've got to change. We've got a shift. I think the SDGs pre 2030 gave us an aspiration. And I think we're very clear about the aspiration. I think we now need to focus on how do we get there. And remember the SDGs were for governments, the targets are for governments. And then there's this SDG 17, which is sort of, you know, this footnote of, oh, by the way, you know, this can't be achieved by governments. We need business to be involved, etc, etc. But I think it needs to be much stronger than that. These are targets for all of us. And they need to be allocated to business. Because I think it's too easy. There are too many get out of jail clauses at the moment. I would just add to say, I think one of those get out of jail things is the fact that we separate business from other types of organizations, you know, reporting did a good job of that. It's part of the symptom of the issue or in business as usual, that we, you know, it, you know, we separate, we talk, we call not for profit for profit profit, everyone needs profit to thrive. So we just need to remember that that's being co-opted. And I just wanted to make a very small note on the SMEs. In the context of that is also, if we think that we're having all this complexity to the large organizations, the large businesses, that complexity is being passed down the system and cascaded to SMEs and smaller organizations, businesses or any other organization, who is then having to comply with something that is not designed for them to be able to comply with. So we have to have the whole system view and we need the clarity, like you say, of the simple reality that we can all apply, because it's even with the massive departments taking so much energy from large organizations, they could be using for innovation. What is going to be that cascading effect on the rest of the economy? We just have to get much cleverer than we are now. Thank you. Thank you. I think I have to hand it over as much as I think the discussions just heated up to Heather to wrap up. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. So, so much to think about. Thank you for this amazing session. Thank you very much to the Science Summit. To each of our speakers today to the session organizer, Philip Sege of the Doshishi University. It's hard. It's hard to know how to wrap up. It's such a significant session. I'm still reeling and it's probably impossible to do in just a moment. But the speakers have given me much to think about. Hoshina Sensei, your call to action for this watershed moment as you called it is loud and passionate. Thank you for setting the stage so distinctly today. Dr. Hearth, I appreciate your no-nonsense approach to words and concepts. I have much to think about in the connections between the economy, sustainability, governance, long-term well-being and real purpose, the driven organizations. Dr. Abela, thank you for the context of the important details around the standards and for including the ever important concept of materiality and a call for impact reports alongside financial statements. Professor Philip, of course, we already know each other. I always appreciate hearing and listening from you. So thank you for underlining the seven stakeholder groups and benchmark and your call for rigor around value. That really resonates for me and for describing it in infinite, the infinite possibility there. Sato Sensei, thank you for zooming out and connecting the discussion to global governance, security, public policy, and to hope. I heard hope in there. So there is much to process here, but everyone please be reassured that we will make this recording available on OIST's YouTube channel in the coming weeks. In the meantime, please fill out the feedback section of the summit program. It's very short and very appreciated. So let's end it here. Thank you. Thank you very much to all of you. Melissa, thank you. Good night. Thank you everyone, and we will follow up in November with a deeper dive. So with our global innovation summit November 17. So thank you again for United Nations, to the Cabinet Office, to OIST, to all of the speakers, and we'll have even more time to dive in in November. Thank you all very much. And Heather, thanks for giving us this opportunity. This has been fantastic. So great. And we can end there. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day or evening. Bye bye.