We Want You...To Critique Our Worldwide Corporate Responsibility Report

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We just received the comment below from Michelle, and I was so impressed by her thoughtful analysis of our most recent Worldwide Corporate Responsibility Report that I felt compelled to post it here, in its entirety. Michelle, I think we should hire you to help us with our next report! You have made some outstanding points, posed some great questions, and offered some very useful suggestions for our future CSR reporting endeavors. We welcome feedback on our CSR reporting and performance progress, so I hope some of you other bloggers out there will follow Michelle's lead and let us know how you think we're doing. For those of you who haven't seen Michelle's insightful comments, here's what she had to say: "I'd like to thank McDonald's for setting up this blog that gives people the opportunity to feed back on your CSR work, including your 3rd CR report. Overall I think your 3rd CR Report is a great tool for readers to better understand your business and your progress and challenges in managing your CR impacts. Below I have set out four really strong aspects of the report and then five areas where I'd like to see more in the next report or on the website. Strong Points 1. Learning about the business. I learned a lot about the McDonald's business, which really helps me to think through your CSR challenges is a more realistic way. I hope more 'stakeholders' are reading such reports in order to offer up more informed and realistic critiques, and solutions. For example, I didn't know that more than half of McDonald's revenues come from Europe, that 75% of the stores are franchises (owned and operated locally), or the extent to which McDonald's is a very process driven organization. I'd be interested to learn about how your CR commitments are applied to other brands and business owned by McDonald's, such as Pret a Manger. I enjoyed the Jessica Sansom interview (p. 63) which really brings alive what people at McDonald's actually DO to make differences based on simple changes to the procedures they follow. She says, 'For example, you can be accepting a delivery and sorting out cardboard for recycling. You could be changing the cooking oil and storing the used oil, which could be sent for recycling into biodiesel...' It is also interesting to learn about and hear from other people behind the McDonald's brand--employees but also your suppliers and owner/operators too. 2. Follow the money. Following on from understanding the business, I applaud McDonald's for investing in research to map out the business' local economic impacts. Such studies help demystify 'who benefits' from economic activity and show how local communities can benefit, and where they might not. I'd love to read more detail about your Brazil and US research--but can't find the reports on your website. 3. Transparent and listening. I think the input from the Haas students really adds value. Their research is informative but even more it illustrates that McDonald's is open to external input and review. I think the Ceres questions panels work really well by helping the reader understand what the critical issues are in each section, and it gains credibility by coming from an external viewpoint. 4. Good on challenges--what you can't do. Finally, I like the 'Our Challenges' boxes that state where you are not making progress or where the greatest difficulties lie. These give an honest evaluation of where you can't make progress alone and why. Five opportunities for more progress? 1. Your CSR journey, and the really hard stuff. I would like to see your reporting describing your journey in CSR--so to include some context of where you have come from (including past mistakes) and where this is all going. My reading between the lines is that McDonald's is at a stage of correcting past mistakes, putting in place processes to better manage the business across economic, social and environmental issues. This will put you in a position of internal excellence. The next step will be to reach out to work more with suppliers, and finally to truly assess and address the sustainability of the McDonald's business model. The Haas students recommended (p. 26c) McDonald's should 'begin to look beyond fixing incremental problems within its current system and, instead, consider transforming the system itself'. Mcdonald's has done this in your work in partnership with other companies to use your influence within the supply chain on the Soya Amazon issue. I would love to see McDonald's learn from Wal-Mart's approach to addressing the wider 'systemic' challenges. What is it that stops McDonald's from becoming a truly sustainable company? - Limited consumer interest? - Limited technologies - packaging... - Established food production systems - price setting - Cost of alternative energy precludes McDonald's buying it 2. Structure and priorities. The inside front cover of the report profiles your progress on nutritional information, sustainable fish and philanthropy. The prominence of these 3 suggests they are your strategic focus areas, which I don't think they are--they are just where you have the best story to tell, right? perhaps it would be better in the opening spread to present your priority CR areas and why they are your priorities. From the report it seems that they are: 1. healthy products 2. responsible supply chain 3. McDonald's people 4. local communities and environment Or are these just how you 'manage' the issues internally? Or maybe just how you structured the report? I think your communications could be clearer on this. 3. Other points of view? You mention that it is hard to respond to all opinions and contradictory voices from your critics. I'd like to hear more (including on this blog) about who the critics are and what their views are. 4. Stronger environmental reporting. Increasingly greenhouse gas driven climate change is seen as the major environmental challenge to our planet. The McDonald's report is quite weak compared to the reports of other companies in this area. Why do you only give figures for GHG emissions for your company-operated restaurants outside China and the USA? I'd be interested to know if you can plot out the whole carbon footprint of your business. If not, will you be able to do soon? It would also be good to read about how you approach the issue of biodiversity. 5. More numbers. Next time it would be good to have more numbers in your targets--exactly what reductions or improvements are you aiming for? Also I think readers may need some contextual information to better understand your KPIs. For example, 521 of your meat supplier processing plants are audited. But how any meat supplier processing plants do you have in total? On your philanthropy, it would be interesting to know more about the objectives of your giving (what are you aiming to achieve) and then how you measure whether this giving succeeds in these objectives. Finally, I would be very interested to know more about your plans for new nutrition information on packaging to be in 20,000 retaurants worldwide by end of 2006. Is there more information available online about this? Thanks, Michelle" Well said, Michelle, though I need to point out a few corrections related to the data in your comments. First of all, 35% of 2005 revenues came from Europe. These do not include revenues from Pret a Manger, which is part of the separate "Other" category. Second, our report says that more than 73% of McDonald's restaurants are owned and operated locally by local independent businessmen and women. I know there are others out there like Michelle who have insights to offer. Don't hold back. We want to hear from you. I'd love to see some more critiques of our most recent report before I respond to Michelle's. Post your comments and/or questions, and I'll respond to them in full.