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Monday, December 21, 2015

Santa's 2015 SDG Report

With only four more shopping days to Christmas, the time is here once again to preview Santa's Sustainability Report. Reporting is a long Santa tradition. Check out Santa's prior reports:

Santa's 1750th Sustainability Report 2014

Santa's First G4 Comprehensive Sustainability Report 2013
Santa's First Integrated Financial and CSR Report 2012
Santa's 1,747th 2011 Annual CSR Report
Santa's 1,746th 2010 Annual CSR Report
Santa's 1,745th 2009 Annual CSR Report

Santa Claus Inc. 2015 SDG Report

Leadership Message

Dear Stakeholders,

In a year when climate change has been on the agenda more often than leaked emails from Hillary Clinton, I have to wonder what all the fuss is about. My old friend Heraclitus, whose works I studied as a child, said "Everything changes and nothing stands still". He was so right. The only constant in our world is change. So, now that the climate is changing, why try to stop it? The leaders of the free world came together earlier this month to join forces to stop climate change. We at Santa Claus Inc. take a different approach. We embrace this change and look for opportunity in adversity. For example, the more people that stop stopping climate change, the more coal fires there will be. The more coal fires there are, the more chimneys we will have. The more chimneys we have, the more work we will be able to do, sliding down the chimneys to deliver Christmas gifts and cheer to the world's children. I implore the leaders of the world, for the sake of our children, let the climate be. Change something else.

2015 has been another great year for Santa Claus Inc. Our revenues were up, our operating profit was up, our working capital was down and our spirits were high. (Non-spirits were placed on the lower shelves). We once again brightened up the world with LED lighting on our sleighs, made children happy with gifts bought in bulk from a Taiwanese toymaker with very few human rights abuses and supply chain irregularities, and engaged our employee elves and reindeer through enlightened human resources policies including embryo-freezing, 14 day paid parental leave for anyone who knows anyone who became a parent and a new policy to enable employees to contribute to their community by working as much unpaid overtime as they want. We couldn't have hoped for a better year. And to top it all, a special new customer was born in May 2015 - Princess Charlotte, daughter of William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Amner Hall, their residence, has several chimneys so delivering our gifts for both Royal Kids will be a doddle. The problem is that we are not sure if the 1.5 mile no-fly zone over their house applies to me, my sleigh and my reindeer. If you hear reports of a decline in reindeer population and/or I do not publish a Sustainability Report next year, you will know we were shot out of the sky.

Business Development

In 2015, following years of doing well what we do best, we decided to diversify in order to enhance our contribution to happiness in the world and make more profit by doing things that we do not do best. Our first attempt at diversification was to balance our workload throughout the year, and not just at Christmas time, to provide our elves and reindeer with meaningful activity instead of them just lazing around waiting for the continuation of season 12 of Grey's Anatomy. We started a joint venture with a leading global drug company to increase accessibility to life-saving drugs for children in emerging economies. The plan was to have our elves and reindeer make all-year-round direct-to-home discounted deliveries of benzodiazepine to help families address panic disorder, general anxiety disorder and insomnia in children between the ages of 2 to 49. The program started well and we were able to provide tranquility to many households. However, when several elves started to have convulsive epileptic seizures we knew something was wrong. Investigation revealed a benzo black market resulting from elves skimming benzos from each delivery and selling them to Cuban drug cartels. The cartel chiefs threatened the elves if they did not increase drug deliveries to meet their growing demand. As a result, the elves were so agitated that they started ingesting the very benzodiazepine they had earmarked to sell. Following a review of this new business approach, we realized our risk management program had failed to identify that elf stress, theft, drug abuse and drug trafficking could be possible outcomes of this new business initiative. We have therefore decided to cancel our risk management program and go with our intuition. In this case, with hindsight, it was not such a disaster as, while it lasted, we made more profit from this initiative than we have done in the past thousand years and the Santa Claus Inc. Santa Retirement Fund is now well padded. In future, we will deliver only placebos so that if the elves are tempted, they will only think they are having seizures.

Board on Board

In 2015, we made a concerted effort to onboard the Board of Directors of Santa Claus Inc. following new guidance published by the UN Global Compact. "The Global Compact Board Program is the first of its kind to align and support Boards of Directors to effectively oversee and drive a strategic approach to corporate sustainability....." This year, we decided that our Board must play a more active role in supporting our efforts to improve society and the planet. In addition to making personal contributions to the Santa Claus Inc. Santa Retirement Fund, each Board member has personally committed not to fall asleep in discussions about our sustainability program. Moreover, each Board member will engage in stakeholder dialogue. Fortunately, this is something they can do during their afternoon nap as most are prone to talking in their sleep. In fact, if you can catch what they are saying in between snores and grunts, it's actually more intelligent than what they say when they are awake. We feel sure that our valued stakeholders will not know the difference.

Sleigh Emissions

Following the scandal regarding auto-maker Volkswagen who was found to have been systematically cheating regulators about vehicle emission levels through the use of an electronic device that falsifies emissions test readings, we decided to ensure we are not exposed to such a risk. Aside from a small number of electric sleighs, all our sleighs are run by reindeer power whose emissions levels are, well, restricted to natural bodily functions that involuntarily cause greenhouse gas emissions into the environment. We performed a check by an independent third party to ensure that no electronic devices are implanted in any of our reindeer to interfere in any way with the recording of reindeer emissions. The check involved an internal examination using ultrasound and rear-end visual inspections for all reindeer over the age of six months. While we did not find any emission-related devices, we were amazed at what we did find in our reindeer. In addition to old coins, chewed toy parts, several undigested hamburgers from McDonald's from the 1980s, millions of cigarette butts, an array of candy wrappers and chocolate bar foils, and quite a few old socks, we managed to salvage thousands of iPhone parts, laptop keyboards, earphones, flash drives and cables. As a result, we have created a new for-profit initiative to retrieve reindeer stomach contents and repurpose them for sale. In our first year, we generated a very significant supplemental revenue, most of which was diverted to the Santa Claus Inc. Santa Retirement Fund while the remainder went to fund a new recreational facility for in-service reindeer in the hope that they will swallow even more valuables in their spare time.

Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, we undertook an intensive mapping analysis to identify where the activities of Santa Claus Inc. contribute to the 2030 Agenda and the global Sustainable Development Goals. This report therefore forms our first report against the SDGs and we expect to continue our reporting in line with the SDG framework. Enough of G4 and CDP and everything else. We are converting totally to SDG reporting. By doing this, we express our support for this UN-led initiative and hope to gain a reputational point or two that will help reduce our cost of capital so that the Santa Claus Inc. Santa Retirement Fund will enjoy an improved return over time. The problem was, that in reviewing the SDGs, we didn't actually find anything that we could align with.

All the SDGs are about things we do not have a direct impact on and therefore we recommend an 18th goal. We will call this goal: 18: Make Santa Happy

We believe that the world will benefit immeasurably through ensuring Santa is happy. When Santa is happy, good cheer is spread and kids around the world smile and are more motivated to do well at school and help their parents with household chores. The world becomes a more harmonious place and society is enriched. With a happy Santa, you know that you can sleep easy at night as crime and violence will reduce and there will be more food to enable everyone at the bottom of the pyramid to live in comfort. The elderly will be cared for and poverty will remain a word in a dictionary, bearing no resemblance to any real-world situation. In other words, making Santa happy is the key to achieving all the other Sustainable Development Goals. Here are the targets we recommend:

By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day, and ensure that people who now have all this extra income will make regular donations to the Santa Claus Inc. Santa Retirement Fund
Implement nationally appropriate Santa protection systems and measures including security, cyber-security, and free health care for Santa, elves and reindeer everywhere
By 2030, ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to gifts from Santa
Ensure significant mobilization of resources from a variety of sources, including through enhanced development cooperation, in order to provide adequate and predictable means for Santa to source gifts and toys for the world's children at significantly discounted prices and with elevated commissions for the Santa Claus Inc. Santa Retirement Fund
Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies, to support accelerated investment in the Santa Claus Inc. Santa Retirement Fund.

Not only this, along with many other global corporations, we have made a pledge to achieve a science-based target. The target is to reduce our carbon emissions by 40% per total elves and reindeer employed by 2030 using 1843 as a baseline. In order to achieve this, we will gradually eliminate baked beans and green cabbage from our reindeer diet and demand that elves keep their iPhones on low-power mode at all times.

Elf Healf and Safety

Every year we intensify our efforts to ensure our elves and reindeer remain safe on the job. We don't care about them off the job. In 2015, we held several training activities to enhance the awareness of safety hazards. One of the most significant risks for elves is sliding down chimneys where fires are still burning. This has resulted in so many bottomless elves over the past hundred years that their lack of behinds almost looks like a genetic mutation. In fact, three elf babies were born without bottoms last year which saves on diapers but gives rise to concerns about how elves will manage to sit on our sleighs as we travel the world delivering gifts and good cheer. We are now ergonomically redesigning all our sleighs to enable standing-only. This is not so bad as it means we can cram 23% more elves onto each sleigh, which means we travel fewer overall kilometers which reduces the resource burden on our planet. For those elves that lost their bottom in 2015, we commissioned bebionic to create a unique multi-articulating, pearlescent design prosthetic bottom made of post-consumer recycled stainless steel covered with multi-layered variable hardness material lined with fabric mesh. The bottoms look and feel so real that beneficiary elves can lead a perfectly normal life and sit and s*it wherever and whenever they want. They are so happy with their bottoms that, on World Toilet Day, they volunteered to take part in the global #wecantwait efforts by performing true-life demonstrations of toilet-use in refugee camps in Ethiopia.

Supporting the Sharing Economy

In an attempt to modernize our services, improve global wellbeing and generate new revenue streams, Santa Inc. has finally joined the sharing economy. As you may know, the sharing economy is a new business model based upon peer-to-peer-based sharing of access to goods and services (coordinated through community-based online services). Alongside Uber, AirBnB, Zipcar, Bookmooch and ParkAtMyHouse.com, we have decided to make Santa a sharing Santa. Sign up online at SharingSanta.com to make use of anything that we have and pay for it. For example, book taxi rides by sleigh to any global destination, hire an elf to clean your house or babysit your kids, or borrow one of Santa's red suits to supplement your party wardrobe. We also offer, at a modest rate of $4,000 per night, a place to sleep - Santa's bed in his Lapland home. Of course, Santa sleeps in the bed 364 nights per year, so you will have to share it. If you need earplugs to silence Santa's snores there is a small extra charge. If you need a noseplug for various involuntary odors that Santa emits, there is a small extra charge for that too. If you'd like to be woken up by a live elf alarm system, we can make our elves available in all shapes and sizes, also for a small extra charge. So far, in 2015, the sharing economy has generated more than $1 million in revenue for Santa Inc. Actually, this is not so much from the sharing we offer for use of Santa facilities, but more from the sharing of other's facilities with us. We decided that the many households we reach around the world through our toy deliveries should have the opportunity to share their economy with Santa too. During each visit, we help ourselves to cash we find in wallets, handbags and kitchen cookie jars. This has proven to be a major success as on more than 84% of visits, our beneficiaries have shared more than $100 with Santa. We think this sharing economy is a fantastic idea and kindly request that households make it slightly easier for us to find the cash they wish to share by leaving it on the mantlepiece in an envelope marked Sharing with Santa.

New Mentoring Program for Elves

In response to last year's employee survey, where elves expressed a desire to receive guidance relating to personal growth and development, we hired several mentors to help elves grow. Of course, by nature, elves are short. Helping them grow requires several innovative techniques and ongoing coaching. In order to provide relevant role models, we hired top players from the Chicago Bulls, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Seattle Supersonics. Each player was paired with an elf and charged with teaching him how to overcome his height-challenged physique related issues during a period of six months of intensive mentoring. During this period, elves learned how to spring-jump, walk on stilts, use electronic arm extensions, hover 15 centimeters above ground using kinetic energy, and extend their neck muscles using yoga techniques. Regrettably our elves are still short. Therefore, in a final attempt to meet the personal growth needs of our very important elf stakeholders, we purchased a set of distortion mirrors that reflect you back in triple height. All our elves now think that they are three times taller than they actually are and are completely satisfied. The only problem is that they all applied to join the Bulls, Lakers and Supersonics and couldn't understand why they were rejected.

Combatting Santa Counterfiets

As we report each year, we maintain our ongoing battle to delegitimize Santa branded products that are not approved and licensed by Santa Inc. Although we failed to have the Talking Naughty Farting Santa Doll we reported last year removed from the market, we did succeed in receiving royalties of 50% on each sale. We are now working on the same thing with another product that came to our attention this year, the Chantilly Lane Rip Von Kringle - Singing Farting Santa. As all these Santa functions in doll form appear to delight our customers all around the world, we adopted the "if you can't beat them" philosophy and created our own Santa doll. We call it the Talking Naughty Farting Singing Dancing Twirling Belching Jogging Screaming Humming Skipping Spitting Punching and Praying Santa. Check it out now on Amazon.com to get your delivery just in time for Christmas. We have also adopted a similar collaborative approach with app developers. For example, while the Personalized Phone Call from Santa app may not feature the real me, we have come to believe that this kind of application can support our mission and help spread the Santa message. Unfortunately, this app is free, so our 50% royalties amount to 50% of nothing. Therefore, we successfully negotiated to become the sole and exclusive provider of in-app purchases where all profits go to, yes, you guessed it, the Santa Claus Inc. Santa Retirement Fund. So far we have developed several in-app purchases: a slurpy kiss from Santa ($50), a Santa fart (using the Talking Naughty Farting Santa Doll) ($100) and a Santa indecent proposal ($500). As you can imagine, the last app is the most popular, although several customers asked for a refund when they discovered that the indecent proposal was a copy of the 1993 move starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore which can be rented from Amazon.com at $3.99. We are now considering more sustainable options.

Feedback on this report
We will be happy to receive your feedback on this report, as long as it's positive.

In the meantime....

We Wish You and Everyone in the World

a Happy Holiday Season and a

Happy New Year

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting AND Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen) or via my business website www.b-yond.biz (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm). Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz

Monday, December 22, 2014

Holiday Wishes

As usual, around this time of year, the #CSR Reporting Blog wishes all its followers "Happy Holidays". I think I said it best last year which I quoted from the year before. We love to recycle on the CSR Reporting Blog. Here goes. Again.

This is a time to reflect on the joys of life and the joys of publishing Sustainability Reports. A time to be merry and indicator-driven. This is a time to eat well and edit well, engage with friends and dialogue with all stakeholders, think about what's important to you and call it material, recommit to your higher purpose, approve your reporting budget and select your reporting consultant.

Usually the #CSR Reporting Blog finds an innovative and humorous way to spread holiday cheer. But there is a limit to the number of alternative ways we can find to say Merry Christmas, Seasons Greetings, Have A Cool Yule, Ho! Ho! Ho! and such other appropriate expressions. So this year we are going to go with the very inclusive: Holiday Wishes.

To all the #CSR Reporting Blog readers and everyone working in the #CSR and #Sustainability field to help make our world a better place, we wish you:

HOLIDAY WISHES!

And to our culinary readers: Holiday Dishes!
And to our aquamarine readers: Holiday Fishes!
And to our dancing readers: Holiday Swishes!
And for our cybercrime readers: Holiday Phishes!
And to our chef readers: Holiday Quiches!
And to our dog-loving readers: Holiday Leashes!
And to our shopaholic readers: Trolleyday Wishes!
And to our young daughter readers: Dollyday Wishes!
And to our parrot-loving readers: Pollyday Wishes!
And to our tennis-playing readers: Volleyday Wishes!
And to all our readers in rainy Manchester: Brollyday Wishes!
And to all our readers who are suckers: Ice-Lollyday Wishes!
And to our slightly dumb readers: Wallyday Wishes!
And to our dog-loving readers: Collieday Wishes!
And to our mistake-making readers: Follyday Wishes!
And to our playful readers: Holiplay Wishes!
And to our LGBT readers: Holigay Wishes!
And to our pessimistic readers: Holigrey Wishes!
And to our not leaving readers: Holistay Wishes!
And to our horse-loving readers: Holihay Wishes!
And to our readers who buy beefburgers at Tesco: Holineigh Wishes!
And to our French milk-drinking readers: Holilait Wishes!
And to our religious readers: Holipray Wishes!
And to our dyslexic readers: Wolliday Hishes!

And finally, to all the CSR Reporting Blog readers who prefer to rest instead of publishing Sustainability Reports:

Holidays Forever!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting AND Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen) or via my business website www.b-yond.biz (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Santa's 1,750th Sustainability Report

This is the time of the year when we preview Santa's Sustainability Report. Once again, this report is a G4 report, in accordance with G4 comprehensive level. Reporting is a long Santa tradition. Check out Santa's prior reports:

Santa Claus Inc. 2014 Sustainability Report: Leadership Message

Dear Stakeholders,

I am delighted to present our Sustainability Report for 2014 covering the way we have advanced our economic, social and environmental performance during the last year. While we are proud of what we achieved, there is much more to be done. Although we were faced with another challenging year, we were able to deliver record profits and increase our presence in more than 180 countries. At the same time, we remain true to our values and have continued to invest in our sustainability programs.

This is just one example of our commitment to recycling. The first paragraph of this opening letter was copied from most other sustainability reports. Why create your own opening letter when recycling others will do?

However, I do feel the need to be a little more specific about Santa Claus Inc.'s progress in 2014 because it was certainly an eventful year. 2014 was the year in which we continued to do everything we always have done. Although, to be honest, I came very close to handing in my resignation in 2014. I was in the middle of costing my externalities and suddenly I realized that I hadn't accounted for absolutely all of my natural capital. I had lost thousands of CO2e emissions. "Where could they have gone?", I asked myself. And then the penny dropped. After I had picked it up, I answered. We had thrown a party for long-serving elves in the early part of the year, and had promised to offset the emissions caused by fuel-assisted sleigh travel to the venue. According to the figures I received from our Elf Transportation Manager, we offset 4,309.5 tons of CO2e by planting trees in the Sulawesi rainforest. Unfortunately, the amount of CO2e emissions we generated in getting to Sulawesi and back with all our shovels was greater than the emissions we offset. Hence our externalities are now greater than we accounted for and this created a big gap in our environmental profit and loss account. In order to close the gap, I created a special insetting program based on use of reindeer manure as fertilizer for growing muscovado sugar used to make Christmas Pudding. Unfortunately, in order to create more manure, we had to feed the reindeer triple quantities of food and this further exacerbated our externality accounting gap. In the end, I decided that I would not longer account for externalities and revised our accounts to include only internalities. All our reindeer are now on diets and our environmental profit and loss account is in the black. In addition, we are promoting sugarless Christmas Pudding as a healthy alternative to counter growing levels of obesity which is a pressing world problem.

Business developments
During 2014, Santa Claus Inc. made record profits due to the culmination of several trends we have been seeing during the past few years, and our ability to capitalize on these trends:

More toys: More parents are giving more toys to compensate for bad parenting habits. Not only this, but the toys that parents are purchasing are higher in value. Whereas battery-operated Daleks and a Barbie Dolls were the most popular toys some years ago, today, Sony Playstations, iPads, tablets and lifetime supplies of retalin are today's most popular gifts.

More Chinese: As purchasing parity in Asian markets is increasing and disposable income in China is approaching that of Western standards, we are seeing a rise in Christmas gifts which are now given in addition to Chinese New Year gifts. In order to cope with this demand, we have set up a special Santa station in Shanghai, with a locally relevant Santa image holding chopsticks. To get into the spirit of things, we started importing chow mein in to Lapland. We don't serve it for breakfast but you should see our chopstick technique.

More eco: As the IPCC continues to predict our planetary predicament with greater science-based certainty, we understand the importance of going green. This year, we distributed only green toys. Barbie now has a green face but there is a limit to how many toys we could convert to green. We therefore substituted many toys with artificial lawns. The kids love it. Instead of playing in the home, they can now play outside on a lawn and enjoy breathing polluted air.

All of this has had a positive impact on our business results and we had our most profitable year in 2014. We are looking to creating shared value, aligning with future trends and adopting the new post-2015 agenda global sustainability goals. We are sure that, as the only truly globally positive corporation, we can make a difference where it counts. And make even more profit.

Stakeholder Engagement

This is the year that we decided to really push the boat out on stakeholder engagement after listening to the webinar organized by the 2degreesnetwork that included prominent practitioners and thought-leaders. We really wanted to engage with our stakeholders and hear what they are saying about the way we do business and how it affects them. Of course, we used the most popular stakeholder engagement tool, SurveyMonkey. We emailed our questionnaire to all our stakeholders around the world. Basically this is the entire population. We received 34 responses of which 14 were incomplete so we discounted them. Of the 20 complete responses that we received (19 were filled in by me and one by my mother), all confirmed that the most important contribution we can make was to improve Santa well-being and long-term prosperity. We therefore updated our materiality matrix to include this one issue, and have developed a strategy to improve our performance in this area with a target to ensure Santa lives in luxury for the rest of his natural life. You can help make this happen. Send your (large) cash donations to the Santa Claus Materiality Fund via the CSR-Reporting Blog. Do it NOW!

Elf Healf and Safety

This year, in our Elf Healf and Safety Program, we had all our elves vaccinated against the Elfbola virus at great expense to the Santa Claus Inc. Healf and Safety Fund, despite the fact that we paid only half-price for the vaccine which is still in experimental stages. 9,000 elves were vaccinated and 3,411 developed full-blown Elfbola symptoms as a result of the vaccination. As the symptoms are extremely similar to those associated with imbibing excessive quantities of alcohol, which is considered fairly normal for many of our elves, we didn't actually realize that the vaccines were causing the problem until the affected elves didn't show up for work. Once we realized this, we continued the vaccination program because, actually, having the elves off sick is a good way to cut our labor costs which have been rising over the past few years due to aggressive demands from the elf union - the National Elf Representation Directorate (NERD). We therefore continued to vaccinate a further 15,000 elves and 5,000 more got sick. This is such a positive program that we are considering sabotaging further research into Elfbola prevention and cure, so that we can reduce our labor costs every year without NERD complaints.

Elf Future Leaders Program
As a leader in global elf employment, and an organization that takes investment in elf talent extremely seriously, we continue to find new ways to raise the awareness, motivation, commitment and capabilities of our elves in all matters regarding good elf citizenship and saving the planet. This year, we created an innovative program for high-potential elf talent - the Sustainability Elf Well-being Empowerment Retreat (SEWER). The program teaches elves all about sustainability principles during a five-day program in which they are fully immersed in the SEWER. After they complete the program, they become SEWER champions and are accountable for advancing sustainability in our organization. Unfortunately, not all elves made it out of the SEWER with acceptable results and were required to take the retreat once again. Regrettably, we realized that, for some elves, being in the SEWER was actually preferable to coming to work (due to the free unlimited supply of ice cream), and they deliberately failed the SEWER test in order to go back again. Therefore, we took a decision to cease sending elves to the SEWER for a second time and now, if they fail the SEWER test, we send them to the Don't Underestimate Materiality Program (DUMP).

Gender Optimization
We were planning a program for all Santa Claus Inc. female elf employees to be able to freeze eggs and give birth when they are at pensionable age. But we were influenced by the article by Crane and Matten about the problematic ways in which this plays out for women who work at Apple and Facebook. So we decided to take a different route. At Santa Claus Industries Inc., we offer to freeze any body part and even full DNA so that female employees can clone themselves as soon as they start to feel that a new body would be in order, without even missing a single day of work. We have created a special deep-freeze store room for frozen parts and pieces, and hundreds of female elves have already started to create their own stocks of self-parts for future use. Furthermore, we have established a mix'n'match option, so that female elves can swap body cells and parts among themselves, in order to create new bodies that are made up of only the best bits. In fact, this has been so popular that many of our female elves have already started putting this into practice. 43% of our female elves are now not recognizable as their former selves and 24% of them resemble Britney Spears.

Photo credit: people.com

Reindeer Rights

Unfortunately, our reindeer workforce halted work for three weeks in strike action before the Christmas rush this year as traces of reindeer meat was found in frozen 100% beefburgers marketed by a leading retail chain, mentioning no names but every little helps. Our reindeer were so outraged that their meat was being passed off as cheapo beefburgers that they created a global protest campaign on social media. The Reindeer Protection Committee set up a Meat And Nutrition Undermining Reindeer Ethics (MANURE) campaign where reindeer were asked to post a video of themselves pouring a bucket of frozen beefburgers over their heads and challenging three other reindeer to do the same thing. This quickly went viral. Thousands of reindeer participated. Unfortunately, given that packets of frozen beefburgers are actually quite heavy, most of the participating reindeer ended up in hospital with concussion and beefburger lacerations. This disrupted workflows completely and by the time we were ready to do the Christmas Eve rounds, half the reindeer workforce was incapacitated. However, the campaign was a resounding success and now, only horsemeat finds its way into beefburgers.

Partnering for Quality of Life

In 2014, we engaged in our first Public Private Partnership to advance world prosperity. We joined forces with the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, Oxfam, the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank and government agencies of several emerging market countries to help enrich the quality of life for disadvantaged children. The program provides a personally-inscribed Christmas Book from Santa on Christmas Eve for every single child between the ages of four and four and a half. As partners in this program, we created a special Christmas Book, signed by Santa, which describes the way Santa Claus has contributed to the spread of goodwill and cheer during the festive season in different ways around the world over thousands of years. The book is inspirational and includes quizzes and fun activities for the children. I wrote it myself in Laplandish and used Bing to translate it into English and all other languages. Regrettably, Bing translation is not so accurate and most of the books were returned due to profanities in local languages, and other odd turns of phrase. For example, "Santa brings love and affection into people's homes" was translated as "Santa opened a new home-based brothel initiative", and "Santa gave up everything to devote his life to making children happy" was translated as "Santa went bankrupt after being accused of child molestation." After recalling all the books, all our partners in the program decided to back out and we were left with several million copies crowding out our warehouses in Lapland. To avoid sending the books to landfill, we held a big open bonfire over several days to keep people warm in the freezing Lapland winter. This melted all the local ice and caused a tidal wave which precipitated floods in the Baltic Sea which drowned out most of Sweden and the Baltic Countries and all their inhabitants. Although, socially, this was a big disaster, we can take credit for immediately reducing the world's population by 15 million people and easing the environmental resource burden on the planet. In this way, even without the Santa book, we contributed to enriching the quality of life for everyone else.

Crowdsourcing through Kickstarter

This year, instead of sourcing our toys through conventional channels, we decided to exploit the opportunities of the digital world and set up a Toy Sourcing Project through Kickstarter which is a vibrant community of people working together to bring new things to life. We asked citizens of the world to pledge money to support the cost of this year's global Christmas Gift burden. We were overwhelmed at the response. In addition to money, people sent used sleighs, second-hand elf socks and thermal vests, used cellphones, first aid kits for frostbite and chimney burns and a range of used board games. To deal with all of this, we set up a complex sorting program using volunteer elves from the Northern Lapland region. While this was highly productive and enabled us to start a new for-profit business for sorting and upcycling trash, providing valuable employment for local elves, a new climate-smart project for our insetting initiative and profit for the Santa Claus Well-being Retirement Fund, it did not really help us meet our global toy demand for 2014. Next year we will create a more specific Kickstarter project asking for funds to support local volunteer-based toy assembly workshops in 143 countries. We figure that if we can get the children involved as volunteers in making the toys that they will eventually receive on Christmas Eve, we will save sourcing and logistics costs while providing meaningful volunteer work for million of under-age vandals, thereby solving some of the world's most pressing problems in one fell swoop.

Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption

In 2014, we updated our Santa Claus Inc. Code of Conduct. We have included a clause that prohibits elves from taking or receiving gifts. Unfortunately, as most of the work of the elves involves distributing gifts, we had to discipline all our elf population for breach of our Code of Conduct. Disciplinary action included unpaid overtime, special Santa duty rostas (making coffee for Santa, combing Santa's beard and giving Santa neck massages) and donating half their elf monthly salary to the Santa Claus Well-being Retirement Fund. As a result, the update to our Code of Conduct was highly profitable and we are now considering adding another clause that prohibits breathing at work.

Fighting Counterfeit Santas

We have been particularly disturbed this year by the growing instances of counterfeit Santa Claus dolls available on the market. We have an army of elves gainfully employed in the manufacture of life-size Santa Claus lookalike dolls here in Lapland and they are all modeled on me. Every doll is unique and captures my exact facial expressions and body position at the time of manufacture. I have to pose for days on end in order to allow the elves to capture the exact position of my arms, legs, eyebrows, and eyeballs. Fortunately, the dolls do not emit sound as on Thursdays, I pose for doll-modelling after our regular Thursday very large lunch of baked beans, a rare delicacy in Lapland. When this happens, all the elves wear earplugs and nose-grips so that their creative talents are not interrupted by unwelcome sounds and smells over which I have no control. The elves suggested we produce a Santa Claus Total Reality Doll version, as a special edition, and we had just begun to work on this when, to our surprise, we noticed the Talking Naughty Farting Santa Doll available on Amazon.com for $12.95. We believe this is in direct violation of our Santa Products registration rights and have taken out an injunction to prevent further sales. In the meantime, if you really want to hear Santa fart, you are invited to Lapland after lunch any Thursday. After this experience, Santa will have a whole new meaning for you and your family.

Disowning Santa Impersonations
Another worrying trend continues this year with people getting dressed up as Santa Claus in order to stage protests of one form or another. This year it was a crowd of Santa impersonators protesting at trade deals between Europe and the U.S. The TIPP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) negotiations are getting people worried and it seems that dressing up as Santa Claus helps get the message through. While some might find this mildly flattering, I wish to assure Santa lovers and supporters everywhere that Santa does not take part in protests, lobbying, activism, public campaigns for political change or mass demonstrations of any sort. Protesting trade agreements in the name of Santa is not-acceptable. But, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. We are now planning to stage an even bigger protest campaign of our own by delivering a six-pack of Coca Cola to all world leaders with the message: Santa: the Real Thing. The six-packs are set to self-destruct causing a fair amount of damage if a Santa impersonation is detected within the vicinity.

In addition, we have also witnessed a rise in the unauthorized use of the Santa name in campaigns such as #TextSantaKodakMoment where celebs take a picture that has something to do with Santa and Christmas and post it on the internet in order to drive charitable donations. We have no wish to spoil everyone's fun, and if the donations were routed to the Santa Claus Well-being Retirement Fund we would have no objection. As it stands, however, Santa Claus has not agreed to be part of these celeb moments and we are considering recourse to illegal action if such campaigns continue.

Awards Received

Every year, we are delighted to be acknowledged by our stakeholders for the (very) positive contribution we make to the world and we love accepting the many awards that are bestowed upon our organization and its people. In 2014, we were honored to receive many awards:

First Prize for the Best Workplace in Lapland: Our elves feel extremely privileged to work for Santa Claus Inc. Not only have we had no unfair dismissal complaints for three consecutive years, nor have (almost) any elves committed suicide, the results of our employee survey shows that elves are 46% engaged, 51% committed and 57% supportive of our mission, vision and values. 99% of elves believe we make a positive contribution to world peace, but only after we agreed to supplement survey month pay-packets with double wages for positive responses to this question. Still, I am sure they believe it.

Lapland's Chamber of Business Most Profitable Company Award for 2013: We don't make a lot of profit, but we do make more than any other business in Lapland, being by far the largest corporation and employer in the region. The Chamber of Business recognized this, as our membership is dependent upon our donating a portion of our profits to the Chamber, This year, our donation funded new thermally lined ear-muffs for all Chamber officials as well as a year's supply of Santa Claus Inclusive Woolly Socks for One-Legged People.

The 2013 Universal Award for the Most Eco-efficient Christmas Gift Distribution System: This award was particularly important to us, given our efforts to move to hybrid sleigh distribution with part-animal, part-electric reindeer, and our new solar powered robot elves. We have moved to green energy for all of our toy assembly operations and we have found a way to turn the Lapland snow into biogas to fuel our office generator. It doesn't generate much heat but it gets the elves shoveling snow away from our sleigh runways.

The Global Award for the Best G4 Sustainability Report of 2013. We were honored to receive this award for the best G4 sustainability report, reflecting our material issues with focus, clarity and relevant transparency. It is no surprise that we won this award. Dr. Sustainability gave us some great tips!

Feedback on this report
We will be happy to receive your feedback on this report, as long as it's positive.

In the meantime....

We Wish You and Everyone in the World a Happy Holiday Season and a Happy New Year.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Why YOU HAVE to attend.......

..... the fourth annual Smarter Sustainability Reporting conference. It's on February 24th, 2015 in London. It's THE annual conference all about sustainability reporting that I chair every year. No, it's not just for reporting geeks, though geeks are thoroughly welcome.

And the reason YOU HAVE to attend is that, for three years now, we have held these totally amazing, informative, content-rich, expertise-packed, opinion-forming, insight-generating, brain-cell-activating, networking-supporting conferences and we still do not have the answer to the question: What is Smarter Sustainability Reporting? We've debated, discussed, shared, chaired, talked, balked, asked, answered, thought, contemplated, ruminated, instigated, irritated, cajoled, encouraged, suggested, digested and just about everything else you do and don't do at conferences... and we still don't have a definitive answer. That's sad. We may have had an answer in the second conference, but then the world changed and we went back to the drawing board at conference three. At this, the fourth annual, we simply have to have an answer. Maybe YOU are the one who can help?

We have a great line-up of expert speakers and panelists - and still more to confirm.

Nelmara Arbex, Chief Advisor on Innovation in Reporting, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
Sarah Grey, Markets Director, International Integrated Reporting Council, IIRC
Steve Kenzie, UK Network Secretariat, Global Compact Network
Simon Howard, Chief Executive Officer, UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association (UKSIF)
Dr. Paul Toyne, Sustainability Director, Balfour Beatty Construction Services
Louise Tyson, Head of Reporting, BP
Katie Buchanan, Head of Sustainability and Reporting, Virgin Media
Irene Jakobi, Sustainability Manager, Telekom Austria
Mardi McBrien, Managing Director, Carbon Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB)
Shaun Davis, Group Director of Safety, Health, Wellbeing & Sustainability, Royal Mail
Crystal Crawford, Corporate Responsibility Manager, Liberty Global
Verity Lawson, Sustainability Reporting Manager, British American Tobacco
Michaela Rose, Sustainability Advisor, Forum for the Future

You would think that these fantastic experts would have ALL the answers but I can promise YOU, they can't do it on their own. They need YOU.

How do YOU define Smarter Sustainability Reporting? What makes smart smarter? And what makes reporting reporting? From GRI G4 to integrated reports to carbon disclosures to investor interest to innovation to local/global to transparency, creativity and materiality and a whole lot more, we'll be looking to get at the answer that has been evading tens of speakers and hundreds of delegates since the start of our conference series. Do YOU know? Are YOU harboring a totally intelligent response that we are all waiting for? Are YOU willing to share? Will YOU come to the conference and enlighten all of us?

If YOU decide to come and help us out, I can offer YOU a discount (being the chair has some privileges) and I can promise to be eternally grateful. And so will everybody else. YOUR presence and contribution is absolutely what will make the difference.

That's not to say that in three years of conferences we haven't answered other questions about reporting, the reporting landscape, trends, challenges, risks and opportunities. A mix of practitioner and subject-matter experts, we have always had rich debate and generated a host of action-oriented insights. The feedback from attendees has always been strong. Each conference has been remarkable. The desire to share and learn more about what's going on in reporting is obviously very much alive for both reporting geeks and reporting non-geeks. That's why we keep doing it.

You may be wondering by now, what's the point of having a conference every year that can't answer its own question? I remember someone quoting some smart famous person who said: if you keep doing the same things, you keep getting the same results. Or something like that, probably more elegantly put. Which is exactly why we continue to shake things up every year. No two conferences are the same. We have a different agenda, different speakers, different round-table talk sessions, different panel discussions and different areas of focus. We don't keep doing the same things but we still don't have the answer to this really truly completely fully exceptionally elusive question: What is Smarter Sustainability Reporting? Obviously, we have been missing something. Yes. We have been missing YOU. So, please come. Please share. Please tell us YOUR answer. Please help make this conference even more remarkable.

So: Block out the date in your diary. Contact me for a 15% discount code. Register. Get prepared to share. And watch this space in the run-up to the conference for more posts in conversation with some of our speakers.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Dr. Sustainability is BACK!

Dr. Sustainability is back in town, and as always, she is delighted to answer CSR Reporting Blog reader questions.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: How can you tell if a materiality analysis is genuine or if it was written on the back of an envelope over a beer in the pub?

Dear Alcoholic: If it was written on the back of an envelope over a beer in the pub, it's probably more genuine than most of the ones that weren't.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: What sustainability conferences have you attended recently and what conferences do you recommend?

Dear Curious: I have almost been attending loads of fantastic conferences. A couple of months ago, I was at the Climate Change Deniers Annual Conference. I denied that you can deny climate change and they kicked me out. Then I was at the We Love Reporting Annual Conference. The attendees were all wackos and weirdos so I left early. I mean, you have to be a wacko or a weirdo to love reporting. Last month I was at the Sustainability is an Imperative or We Will Perish Annual Conference. That was so depressing I am still taking valium. The best conference I almost attended was the Sustainable Ice Cream Conference in Vermont, where I was hoping that Ben and Jerry's would be distributing free fair-trade organic ice cream. When I realized that ice cream was not on the menu, I decided to stay home.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: A funny thing happened to me last month. I was finishing up our sustainability report and just as I was about to complete the GRI Content Index, I got an incredible pain that started in my head and traveled all the way down to my feet. Do you think there is any connection between the pain and the GRI Index?

Dear Painful: Yes, I have recommended for years now that GRI Reporting should come with a health-warning. You are apparently one of the lucky ones. Many of my friends and colleagues are now gazing mournfully out of a sanatorium window, unable to recognize their mothers and throwing objects at passing nurses. When you say hello to them, all they can respond is "DMA.... DMA... DMA... page... DMA... G4-21... Page...." and they carry on like that for hours. I think it has gotten a little worse with G4. Now they are mumbling "material Aspects ...... material Aspects ...... material Aspects ...... material Aspects...... material Aspects...."

Dear Dr. Sustainability: I have been reporting for years and now my company has decided to do G4 and wants a materiality matrix. Where on earth can I get a matrix?

Dear Experienced Reporter: The best matrix I have found is The Matrix. You can get it on iTunes. Called "The Most Eye-Popping and Imaginative Movie of the Year", the Matrix will be much more fun than the boring squares and arches of most of the materiality matrices you find in regular reports.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: Can you please advise how I should deal with our chief legal officer who insists on reading our Sustainability Report before it is published. That's never happened before. What should I do?

Dear Backache: The fact that your chief legal officer wants to read the report before it is published is a real disaster. Typically, legal folks see a court case in anything. They can't read a sustainability report without a big pair of scissors and an extra-extra-large delete button. After your chief legal officer has done his thing, you will be left with a cover page, a back-cover, a few nice photos and about two pages of narrative describing improvements in your environmental performance and increases in community donations. Hmmm. I guess that will make your report look quite consistent with most of the reports that have been published in the last ten years. Maybe it's not such a disaster after all.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: We have heard that stakeholder engagement is all the rage these days and at our company we have decided to get some, although we don't really want to. What's the best way to engage hundreds of stakeholders at lowest cost without them really having an influence on what we do? We want to be able to say we have engaged without really engaging.

Dear Engagement: That's such an easy question. I have the perfect solution. SurveyMonkey. Just send out your questionnaire to thousands of anonymous people (you can call them stakeholders if you like, most people don't know the difference). Even better, you can send out your survey to loads of consultants and ask them for their professional opinion for free. If you really want people to engage, promise them that you will donate $0.05 to a charity of their choice for every completed questionnaire. While the quality of feedback you will receive from 437 completed questionnaires will be totally irrelevant to your sustainability strategy and will not be useful in defining material issues, you will be able to tick the stakeholder engagement box with a REALLY BIG TICK.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: I have been reading loads of G4 reports and before I go totally cross-eyed, I was wondering if i am missing something. They all look like G3 reports.

Dear Puzzled: I can recommend you start with Elaine Cohen's G4 Game Changer Series. In this series, expert GRI report-writer and commentator, Elaine Cohen, analyses the differences between G3 and G4 reports of different companies. This cutting-edge analysis will lead you to the same conclusion. G4 reports, so far, are looking pretty much the same as G3 reports. Now you don't need to go totally cross-eyed. Unless you want to.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: How can I make more people read our Sustainability Report?

Dear PeoplePerson: Give your report a new title. Call it: The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: We are having a real problem with gender balance in our company. As much as we try to recruit and promote women, it never works.They all have children that get sick, and they can never work overtime. They decorate their offices with pretty pictures of their kids and family pets, instead of our company values posters, and they are so OTT about multi-tasking that everything gets done without anyone noticing. Our CEO wants to show at least 30% women in management in our Sustainability Report (currently the actual is 0.43%). What can we do?
Dear GenderBender: Look, there appears to be no hope in your company. There are two options. Kick out all the women and make it a male-only company. While this is illegal and immoral, your company will soon go down the tubes before you have a chance to face the court cases and pay the fines. The second option is to make your workplace more women-friendly. Offer all males over the age of 27 free sex-change operations and fire those who don't take up the offer.

Dear Dr. Sustainability: I hear that there is a new trend in sustainability reporting called unsustainability unreporting. What do you think about that?

Dear PeoplePerson: I have always been in favor of telling it like it is.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting AND Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen or via my business website www.b-yond.biz (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Monday, December 23, 2013

Santa's 2013 G4 Sustainability Report

This year, Santa has published a G4-based Sustainability Report, in accordance with G4 comprehensive level. This follows a long tradition of sustainability reporting by Santa. Check out Santa's prior reports:

Santa's First Integrated Financial and CSR Report 2012
Santa's 1,747th 2011 Annual CSR Report
Santa's 1,746th 2010 Annual CSR Report
Santa's 1,745th 2009 Annual CSR Report

As usual, Santa always sends me an early copy of her annual sustainability disclosure, as she knows that the #CSR Reporting Blog is the most widely read blog anywhere that focuses on sustainability reporting. Knowing that featuring on the #CSR Reporting Blog is a privilege reserved for few reports, Santa always makes it worth our while by collecting all the toys that were not distributed to the world's children and sending them along to us on Boxing Day as a gift. This coming Boxing day, the #CSR Reporting Blog has decided not to accept these toys, but to donate them to bloggers everywhere, in return for a small postage fee. If you are a blogger, and would like to receive your free toy on Boxing Day, please make a bank transfer NOW to the #CSR Reporting Blog in the amount of $4,995. As soon as we confirm this amount has reached our account, we will dispatch your free toy.

This year, Santa remains at the forefront of Sustainability Reporting. Last year, Santa's forefront was an Integrated Report, the first one to come out of Lapland, and the only Laplandish Integrated Report to include an Environmental Profit and Loss Balance Sheet whose bottom line was positive, meaning that the environment actually owes Santa a whole lot of money. This positive balance was due to the fact that elves multiplied carbon emission reductions achieved in Lapland by 196, the number of countries in the world, because Santa mentions all these countries in the Integrated Report as target destinations for toys delivered to kids. This exponentially increased Santa's carbon emission reductions and is perfectly credible, using methodology similar to the way the number of sustainability disclosures in Angola is calculated. In the meantime, Santa is trying to figure out how to actually get this money back from the environment, and, if all else fails, may have to ask PUMA to cough up the cash as they owe the environment around EURO 145 million based on their 2010 results. Santa's first Integrated Report for 2012 was helpful to the wider business community as it proved that the phrase "integrated reporting" is actually an oxymoron. This should go down in history as a massive benefit for humanity. It sort of equates integrated reporting to discovering that there is life on Mars.

As Santa likes to demonstrate leadership, advanced-thinking, clear focus, sharp analytical skills, strategic visionary orientation, exceptional interpretive powers and amazing persistence, tenacity and staying power, she decided that this year's report should be written in accordance with G4. The only problem was working out what to call it. Santa consulted SOAP's CSR Report Name Generator and came up with some relevant options:

However, Santa felt that these report titles have been over-used, and decided to generate her own report title. So here it is:

Santa's 2012 G4 Sustainability Report

Chairwoman, President, CEO, CFO, and General Counsel Opening Message

As 2013 draws to a close, our work begins. With a core mission of making kids happier, while increasing the long-term sustainability and short-term profits of toy manufacturers around the world, Santa Claus Inc. is getting ready to make this Christmas the most memorable ever. With the digital divide creating gaps between those who have and those who want to have, we are giving priority to those who are disempowered by the digital divide. All they need to do is drop Santa an email, or use Santa's new IOS7 App, and tell us how the digital divide is limiting their ability to connect with the world at large and VOD at home. We will email back with the Santa Guide to Bridging the Digital Divide. This is a short 300 page manual, in two parts, which is very easy to understand, providing good advice on how to hack hot spots and divert satellite dishes.

Business-wise in 2013, Santa Claus Inc. delivered record profit levels, mainly because we achieved a higher degree of vertical disintegration, outsourcing not only our toy manufacture but also our testing procedures. In previous years, toy testing has been a major drain on our resources and over 18,000 elves were engaged in playing with all the toys we distribute to the world's children, to ensure they are safe and function in the way intended. To do this, the elves had to play with the toys in prolonged intensive sessions in which they had great fun but which usually ended up with the toys breaking or parts dropping off, or in some cases, elves choking to death. This meant that our pass-rate for acceptable toys was extremely low. In order to reduce our expenses and increase our toy pass-rate, we have transferred responsibility for toy-testing to our outsourced toy manufacturers, who are obliged to confirm toy integrity before shipping. We believe this has been an extremely positive change as our toy pass rate is now more than 100%.

Material Issues

In line with G4 guidelines, this year, for the first time ever, we conducted a materiality analysis. We followed a process of stakeholder engagement with internal and external stakeholders, including consultation with the global sustainability guru, John Elfington, an expert in sustainable elf matters, and Jo Elfino, editor of a sustainable business newspaper for elves in the UK.

We identified our key stakeholders as:

Me, Santa Claus
Children
Parents
Employees (elves and reindeer)
The Government of Lapland
Our Bank Manager
Environmental Activists
Elf Trade Unions
Toy Manufacturers
Toy Testers
Sleigh Manufacturers
Reindeer Feed Suppliers
Wrapping Paper Suppliers
Chimney Sweeps
Santa Defense Fund Management
Santa Retirement Fund Management
Santa Benefits Committee
Santa Protection Agency
Santa Well-being Organization
Santa Earn-More-Money Campaign.

Given such a long list of stakeholders we were not able to complete our stakeholder engagement program in time for our Sustainability Report and have therefore assumed we know what most people think. This assumption resulted in a comprehensive and balanced set of most material issues, which we prioritized to deliver a list of 6 main issues that our report focuses on. These are our most material issues:

Improving (Urgently) Santa Compensation and Well-being
Advancing Santa Recognition around the World
Busting the Santa Disbelievers Movement
Ensuring the Ongoing Viability of the Chimney Sweep Profession
Increasing the Longevity of Elves and Reindeer
Ensuring Children do not Express Dissatisfaction with Toys Received

Our new Santa Sustainability Strategy for 2050 will address these material issues and ensure we maintain our license to operate and deliver a positive net contribution for humanity including generations to come and tremendous shareholder return.

We submitted our report to GRI for the Materiality Matters Application Level Check, but were told that the GRI team is so completely underwhelmed with the number of companies submitting their reports for the check that they are considering revising the check to a "Materiality Matters As Well" Check, reverting to confirming that reporters have simply ticked the right boxes. As we await their conclusions, we take comfort in the fact that we can now declare our report as meeting the "in accordance" requirements and no-one will tell us anything to the contrary.

New Shared Value Services

This year, in addition to distributing toys for children around the world, we decided that Santa should become more inclusive and we therefore started marketing a Santa Adult Toy range. This includes adult toys not typically suitable for anyone under the age of 37, and no, I won't go into details. Suffice it to say that the elves toy testing team was very sorry when adult toy testing was outsourced. However, this has posed a bit of a problem. Some of the adults have the same names as their children, and in a few cases, shipments were delivered to the wrong recipient. We are currently facing litigation for damages relating to a 5 year old boy who went into shock after an inflatable life-size doll exploded in his face, and a 6 year old girl who locked herself in a pair of handcuffs and was prevented from joining Christmas dinner festivities with her family.

In 2013, in order to get closer to our stakeholders, we opened up our Santa Claus Visitor Center here in Lapland. We are now offering round-trip packages from wherever you are in the world, accompanied by travel emission offsets so that you can take your trip with a clear environmental conscience. We intended that income from offsets would support the development of renewable electricity from combustion of reindeer antlers. Unfortunately, de-antlering all our reindeer proved problematic, and we already ruined 43 chain-saws in the process. Therefore we moved to plan B, which involves cloning Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, so that we can use all those reindeer red noses to provide lighting for all our operations. As reindeer have not yet been cloned, we feel this is a fabulous example of pioneering shared value sustainability progress, and we look forward to welcoming you to our Santa Claus Visitor Lit-by-Reindeer-Noses Center sometime in 2014. Aside from knowing your visit is carbon-neutral, you will also be able to chart the history of Santa Claus using our new android app, examine reindeer droppings through the ages, see elf fashion through the centuries, taste nutritional low-salt home-made probiotic reindeer-flavor yogurt, and read all Santa's previous Sustainability Reports. While the Visitor Center targets a population with a mental age of below 15, we also welcome politicians, CEOs and government officials.

Reindeer Rights

Last year we had three complaints from the Global Reindeer Rights Protection Association (GRRPA) claiming that we are not paying our reindeer a living wage. We responded that we pay them a wage and they are living, and therefore didn't understand the problem. In order to deflect further complaints, we entered into a collaborative relationship with the GRRPA as they address the issue of reindeer trafficking. Trafficking affects some thousands of young reindeer, who are enticed from their families at an early age with the promise of well-paying jobs delivering toys in Hollywood and Bollywood. Once in the clutches of the reindeer traffickers, they are starved, drugged, abused, stripped of all reindeer dignity and forced to give reindeer rides for toddlers in shopping malls located anywhere but Hollywood and Bollywood, after which they end up as reindeer soup in high-end restaurants. By comparison, our 23-hour work day during the 12 days of Christmas is an attractive proposition. Our collaboration with the GRRPA includes a full employee communications kit and a compilation of visually disturbing videos of dignitaries eating reindeer parts at ceremonious dinners. These communication kits are designed to help all reindeer in Santa's employ realize that they actually have an easy life and that additional requests for protection of their rights will be met with disdain. In 2013, this worked and zero complaints were submitted to the GPPRA.

Elf Empowerment

As part of our ongoing investment in elf personal and professional growth, we created a special Elf Leadership And Talent Exceptional Development (ELATED) program which includes a 360 degree assessment of elf talent, capabilities, competencies and professional and personal relationships. Over 14,000 elves have already taken the ELATED program, participating in 5 residential workshops, meetings, online support and personal coaching from a senior elf mentor. Of the 14,000 elves who took the program, 3 were found to have some leadership and talent, and as soon as they realized this, they left the company to find better-paying jobs. We have therefore decided to replace this program with a new one, called the Developing Exceptional Forward-thinking Leadership And Talented Elves (DEFLATE) which focuses on helping elves continue to do the things elves do badly. This will increase our elf retention rate and save costs, while ensuring that all kids around the world receive at least one gift at Christmas time, even if it is the wrong one and arrives in more pieces than intended.

Ethical Supply Chain

I was very distraught this year by the fire in the Rana Plaza operation in Bangladesh. It was a major tragedy to see so many people lose their lives due to unsafe working conditions. As a result, I personally visited all our toy manufacturing facilities in Bangladesh and asked them to ensure that all workers wear safety goggles and white overalls. Safety procedures may not have improved but at least the workers look good. Further, we considered joining major apparel manufacturers in signing the new Accord on Fire and Building Safety on Bangladesh until we realized this entailed a payment of $500,000 per year. At this point, we decided that outsourced facility safety is not a material issue for Santa Claus Inc. and deleted it from our list.

Bad News

Survey results published by CorporateRegister.com in 2013 demonstrated that report readers find reports more credible if they contain bad news. I have been wracking my brain to try to come up with some bad news for this report. Santa Claus Inc. makes such a positive impact on the world and we do everything so perfectly, that bad news is just not in our lexicon, and even if it were, why on earth would I risk tarnishing our reputation so that the four people who read our report each year will find it more credible? These four people are my parents and my two daughters, and they believe anything they read anyway.

However, as we are leaders in our field, and leaders must be responsive to stakeholder needs, here is some bad news. In 2012, we had a minor injury in our logistics operations when a fork lift truck driver elf backed into a wall. The elf sprained his right wrist on impact. He did not lose working hours and carried on driving the truck without his right wrist. The wall did not collapse and the fork-lift truck continued to operate. Nevertheless, we treated this safety incident very seriously and ran a series of elf discussions to highlight the necessity of not placing walls on fork-lift truck routes. We mapped the location of all our walls, and decided to relocate 27 walls to other positions outside the building. The bad news is that after we removed the walls, the roof collapsed, killing 32 elves and injuring another 346.

Vote for Santa

Even though our last report was not shortlisted in the online CRRA '14 global reporting awards, I take great interest in these online awards which advance reporting and help us learn from reporting best practice around the world. It is important to ensure that reporting remains a value adding exercise and continues to support an entire industry of specialists, as well as providing material for the CSR Reporting Blog, which so generously gives exposure to Santa's annual Sustainability Report. However, I am fairly certain that the fact that the Santa Claus Inc. 2012 report was not shortlisted is an oversight. Therefore, I suggest you vote for Santa Claus Inc.'s report anyway. Just delete the name of one of the other reports and manually add in the Santa report. We have made it our objective to achieve number one place in all reporting categories, and you can help. Please make this reporting year an even more memorable one for Santa. Double gifts for your kids in 2014 if you vote. Voting is open through January.

Thank you for taking an interest in the Santa Claus 2012 G4 Sustainability Report. To read the entire 734 page report, please make sure you have a 100mbs broadband connection, about fourteen hours to spare and a supply of sedatives, and download it from our website. We will be happy to receive your feedback, as long as it's positive.

In the meantime....

We Wish You and Everyone in the World a Happy Holiday Season and a Happy New Year.