Reporting Buzz at Daiichi Sankyo

Here is  an interesting way of creating BUZZ with a CSR report  from the Daiichi Sankyo Co Ltd. I refer to their  Corporate Social Responsibility Report for 2008.

thumbnail from CorporateRegister.com

This is the third report from this Japanese pharma and biotech Company, a 52 page PDF which is inspired by GRI guidelines but does not index the GRI Framework. The Group prides itself on its innovative pharma for addressing lifestyle diseases, including thrombotic disorders, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune diseases and more. The Group sells around 900 billion Yen of products and employs around 15,000 people.

What is surprising, refreshing, outstanding about this report is its focus on dialogue with stakeholders. The entire first section of the report, almost a third of its content, is dedicated to detailed approaches to dialiogue with different stakeholder groups. The cherry on the top of this process is the inclusion of a section that preceded the writing of the 2008 report - the two-phase Report Reading session conducted in order to gain stakeholder feedback.

Daiichi Sankyo sent a questionnaire to 159 external stakeholders (consumers) and received 123 responses. Of these, the Company invited 11 individuals to a dialogue session. The Group was split into two, to work on two themes: (1) Creating a better report and (2) Making the report easier to understand. The feedback provided by this group is disclosed in the 2008 report.

What prompted me to look at this report was a similar Report Reading session for the 2008 report which I found on the Internet. This time, the target stakeholder group was 19 Students from a local University School of Business. The themes of this second discussion were more focused (corporate positioning, relevance to stakeholders and quality of the report as a communication tool), the feedback from students more direct and the response by the Company relating to what would be adopted in the 2009 report more transparent.

I like this. I believe this is best practice. A while ago I wrote a post about making your CSR report BUZZ. Now obviously, Daiichi Sankyo had implemented these practices before I produced my post, so I cannot take credit for any indirect influence here whatsoever (unless they were influenced by ultrasonic brainwaves from half way accross the world) .  But it looks to me as though there is definitely a BUZZ in the way Daiichi Sankyo create dialogue around their report, and benefit from it. Well done . I believe this is a model for others to follow. Domo arigato. San.

elaine cohen is the joint CEO of BeyondBusiness, a leading reporting and social-environmental consulting firm . Visit our website at: www.b-yond.biz/en