George Serafeim wants to revolutionize the way businesses calculate their success.
Profit and loss are not enough, says the Harvard Business School professor. Serafeim aims to do what no one has done before: Put a dollar value on the impact of products and operations on people and the planet, then add or subtract it from companies’ bottom lines.
Intel Corp. provides an example of both. Serafeim and his five-person team credited $6.9 billion to the chipmaker in 2018 for paying its employees well and for boosting local economies where it has offices. But they deducted $3.1 billion for what they said was a shortage of women employees, the difficulty of career advancement and not enough attention paid to workers’ health.