Robert Eccles

Robert G. Eccles is a Visiting Professor of Management Practice at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, where he is helping them start the Oxford Said Corporate Accounting and Reporting (OSCAR) Programme and conducting a joint research project with the Ford Foundation on creating more sustainable capital markets. Eccles has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management and is a Berkeley Social Impact Fellow at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley. He was a Professor at Harvard Business School and received tenure in 1989. He left in 1993 to work in the private sector and re-joined the Harvard faculty in 2007, from which he retired in 2016.

After receiving tenure, Professor Eccles started doing research on corporate reporting, a topic which remains of great interest to him from a research, managerial practice, and public policy perspective. He wrote the first book on integrated reporting, One Report: Integrated Reporting for a Sustainable Strategy, which was the winner of the 2010 PROSE award in the category of Business, Finance, & Management. His most recent book, published in November 2014, is The Integrated Reporting Movement: Meaning, Momentum, Motives, and Materiality.

Based on his work on integrated reporting, Eccles has broadened his research and practice activities to understand how companies and investors can generate superior returns by incorporating the material environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues into their resource allocation decisions. He has written extensively on this topic, such as in his column on Forbes.com. Eccles has relationships with major companies, asset owners, and asset managers all over the world with whom he is working on both a research and practice perspective.

Eccles is a Senior Advisor to the BCG Henderson Institute, a member of the board of the Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets at the Stockholm School of Economics, and a member of the board of TruValue Labs, a big data sustainability vendor. He was he founding Chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and one of the founders of the International Integrated Reporting Council. In 2011, Dr. Eccles was selected as one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior – 2012 for his extensive, positive contribution to building trust in business. In 2013, he was named the first non-accountant Honorary Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), one of only nine since 1999.

Dr. Eccles received an S.B. in Mathematics and an S.B. in Humanities and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University.