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Robert Eccles
Saïd Business School, University of OxfordRobert G. Eccles is a leading authority on corporate purpose, sustainable investing, and integrated reporting. The purpose of companies is to deliver profitable solutions for their customers while cost-effectively minimizing any negative impact they have on the world while doing so. This is the foundation for long-term shareholder value creation. Sustainable investing is the integration of material risk factors into investment decisions and engaging with companies on how to manage these risks to deliver long-term returns. Both companies and investors need relevant and reliable information on these risk factors and so sustainability reporting standards play a central role. Through integrated reporting companies and investors understand how sustainability can contribute to financial performance. Eccles has been working in this domain for over 30 years.
Currently Eccles is a Visiting Professor of Management Practice at the Said Business School, University of Oxford. Eccles has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management and was a Berkeley Social Impact Fellow at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley. Eccles started his academic career at the Harvard Business School where he received tenure in 1989.
Eccles is the first Chair of KKR’s “Sustainability Expert Advisory Council.” He co-chairs the “ESG Advisory Council” at Novata and is on the “Sustainability Advisory Board” of Persefoni. Eccles was the founding Chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, and was 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. In 2018 he was named by Barron’s as one of the top 20 influencers in ESG investing and cited for being an “ESG research trailblazer.” Also, in 2018 he received “The CSR Lifetime Achievement Award” at “The 8th International Conference on Sustainability & Responsibility” in Cologne, Germany.
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. He currently resides in Concord, MA with his wife Anne Laurin Eccles and their three dogs Rowan, Basil, and Hugo. They have four children (Charlotte, Philippa, Isabelle, and Gordon) and 11 grandchildren (Scout, Russell, Thomas, Thora, Frederick, Dashiell, Philip, Maple, Celeste, Wilde, and Nessa). His main outside activities are weightlifting, which he started at 60 years old, and tire flipping, which he started at 71 years old. He is quite good at the dead lift and achieved his personal goal of 400 pounds with a 410 lift on December 28, 2020—putting him at the 99.8th percentile for his age (70-80) and weight (180-200) group. His PR for 10 consecutive flips of his 550-pound Michelin tire—set on September 15, 2023—is 2’ 53”.