It’s time to rethink the corporate scorecard
By Tessa Clarke, Co-founder & CEO of B Corp Olio, the food sharing app
In 1970, economist Milton Friedman famously argued that the “social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” It’s difficult to overstate the influence that idea has had on the subsequent half-century of business.
The pursuit of shareholder value has driven extraordinary innovation, investment and economic growth. But it has also hardwired a set of incentives into our economic system that are increasingly misaligned with the world we inhabit. When financial returns become the overriding measure of success, environmental costs can be externalised and social impacts overlooked.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for years. And recently, some work we’ve done at Olio has made me wonder whether one of the most powerful ways to change this might be to rethink something so embedded it’s rarely questioned: the corporate scorecard.
Because what we measure matters.
For decades, businesses have become extraordinarily sophisticated at measuring financial performance. Revenue, gross margin, EBITDA, profit, cash flow and shareholder returns are tracked, interrogated and forecast to within an inch of their lives. And more recently, many businesses have started getting much better at measuring their environmental impact too, particularly their carbon emissions.
At Olio, we recently set out to answer exactly that question. Olio was created to tackle waste, so historically much of our impact measurement has focused on things such as meals rescued, household items rehomed, and the carbon emissions and water associated with that waste.
But over the years, our community kept telling us something else was happening. People were making friends, feeling less isolated, getting more exercise, saving money and finding an enormous sense of purpose through volunteering. We knew this mattered; the problem is, we didn't know how much.
So we used MeasureUp, an open framework aligned with HM Treasury’s Green Book, to quantify three specific areas of social impact: improved mental wellbeing, increased physical activity and volunteering. More than 3,000 Olio users participated in the research, with the results combined with anonymised platform data and converted into financial values using recognised wellbeing valuation techniques.
The result was extraordinary.
Our analysis found that the Olio community has generated more than £1.1 billion of social value since we launched, including more than £380 million in 2025 alone. And those figures are deliberately conservative. They exclude several other forms of value Olio creates, and less-engaged users were excluded from key calculations to reduce the risk of overstating our impact.
It got me thinking about how differently we might view businesses if this sort of value routinely appeared alongside their financial results. Because viewed through the lens of social impact, Olio is arguably a unicorn. Viewed through conventional financial metrics, we’re really rather small.
I’m not suggesting we simply add revenue, social value and environmental value together to produce one enormous number called “total value”. There are obvious problems with doing that. Different types of value require different methodologies, some impacts are much easier to monetise than others, and any serious assessment would also need to consider negative impacts and the experiences of other stakeholders such as employees and suppliers.
But the fact that measurement is complicated seems a pretty poor argument for ignoring enormous sources of value altogether.
Different businesses would inevitably measure different things, because their impacts are different. The important change would be recognising that financial performance tells us something extremely important about a company, without pretending it tells us everything important about that company.
This is, of course, closely connected to what the B Corp movement and Better Business Act have been arguing for years: businesses have multiple stakeholders, including workers, customers, communities, shareholders and the environment, and directors should be empowered to consider their interests too when making decisions. And there is growing evidence that this isn't simply about doing the right thing. Research by Demos and B Lab UK found that a nationwide shift towards purpose-led business could add £149bn to UK GDP each year, while UK B Corps have seen 11% employee growth, compared with 2% across UK SMEs, and attracted a median £1.5m in growth funding.
The thing is, this approach is hardly radical. Business leaders already spend much of their time balancing an extraordinary range of competing demands, across different stakeholders and different time horizons. The challenge is that, when the crunch decisions come, our legal and financial architecture can still encourage a shorter-term focus on shareholder returns, rather than creating the conditions for businesses to balance those interests in pursuit of long-term value.
Friedman was writing in 1970. More than half a century later, we have much better tools for understanding the wider value businesses create and destroy. Surely our definition of corporate success should evolve too. Because if we want businesses to optimise for people, planet and profit, perhaps we should start by measuring all three.