We could not have written this book without the help of many other members of the integrated reporting movement, starting with Sydney Ribot. A research associate at the Harvard Business School who is also working on a narrative web TV series about globalization in Istanbul, she contributed to every chapter and appendix in this book through research, writing, critiquing, editing, and the final polishing before the book could be called done. Sydney also took the lead on Chapter 1, “South Africa,” where we would also like to thank Leigh Roberts for making sure we told the South African story accurately. As someone deeply involved in the movement in South Africa and on a global basis as well, Leigh was well positioned to do that for us.

There were other chapters where we depended upon extensive contributions by others, starting with Tim Youmans, an independent researcher, and Andy Knauer, a research associate, both at the Harvard Business School. Tim and Andy had joint responsibility for Chapter 5, “Materiality,” and 6, “The Sustainable Value Matrix.” Tim had the lead on the former and gets credit for having the insight that materiality should be linked to corporate governance by making its determination a responsibility of a company's board of directors. Tim also gave us excellent feedback on the many drafts of the other chapters. Andy conducted a thorough analysis of the materiality matrices of 91 companies that served as the data backbone for this chapter, no doubt making him one of the world's experts on this topic. He also helped with all of the other quantitative analysis described in the book. Without his technical skills, we would not have been able to garner the insights we did from the data he and others worked so hard to gather.

Chapter 7, “Report Quality,” simply would not have been possible without the extraordinary efforts of David Colgren (President and CEO at Colcomgroup), Brad Monterio (Managing Director at Colcomgroup), and Liv Watson (Director of New Markets at Workiva, formerly WebFilings). In spite of demanding day jobs, they managed to spend hundreds of hours collectively gathering and analyzing data based on the integrated reports of 124 companies. They were also instrumental in producing Chapter 9, “Information Technology.” Neither of us has the expertise to have written this chapter on our own. We are also grateful to Jyoti Banerjee of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and Peter Graf and Thomas Odenwald of SAP for their feedback on a draft we thought was pretty close to done. We were wrong, and they set us on the right path. Jyoti called the chapter “not ready for prime time,” and when we challenged him to help us get it ready, he readily agreed to do so. Without his involvement, this chapter could very well have ended up on the cutting room floor. Instead, it survived and gave us the opportunity to introduce his idea of “contextual reporting.”

Chapter 8, “Reporting Websites,” would not have been possible without the indefatigable efforts of Barbara Esty of the Harvard Business School's Baker Library. She singlehandedly coded up the corporate websites of 500 companies—a daunting task. In doing so, Barbara probably became the world's expert on reporting websites and we relied heavily on her for help in interpreting the data she gathered.

Steve Waygood and Louise Haigh of Aviva Investors and Aviva, respectively, are important players in the integrated reporting movement, and we relied upon them for their insights in many areas, especially public policy initiatives and nongovernmental organization (NGO) campaigns important to integrated reporting. We have and continue to learn a great deal from them about such initiatives. In our view, Steve is one of the most important people today supporting the movement from a regulatory and campaign perspective. A “thinker” as well as a “doer,” Steve has also made contributions to the integrated reporting movement through his own writing. We look forward to working with him, Louise, and their colleagues at Aviva Investors and Aviva in the years ahead in support of the movement.

Our book describes five “supporting organizations,” and we are grateful to representatives of each for their feedback on our descriptions of their organizations and their role in the movement. Thus, we would like to thank Nigel Topping of CDP, Allen White of the Global Initiative on Sustainability Ratings (GISR), Nelmara Arbex and Ernst Ligteringen of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Paul Druckman and Lisa French of the IIRC, and Amanda Medress and Jean Rogers of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). We look forward to working with all of them in the years ahead, including Ernst. We suspect that even though he is retiring as CEO of GRI, he will remain an important member of the movement. We would also like to thank him for the great contributions he has made to sustainability and integrated reporting and wish him well in his new endeavors.

We interviewed a number of people for this book, all of whom contributed important insights. For this we would like to thank Nelmara Arbex, Jyoti Banerjee, Aron Cramer, Peter DeSimone, Alexandra Dobkowski-Joy, Jane Diplock, Paul Druckman, Louise Haigh, Bob Herz, Yan Hui, Anthony Miller, Jeanne Chi Yun Ng, Kathee Rebernak, Richard Sexton, Yoshiko Shibasaka, Susanne Stormer, Nigel Topping, Mike Wallace, Steve Waygood, Allen White, Christy Wood, and Ying Zhang. In terms of data, we got help from Satu Brandt and Ian van der Vlugt of GRI for data on the number of sustainability and integrated reporting companies as discussed in Chapter 3 “Momentum” and from Christina Salomone, Scott Dill, and Susanne Stormer of Novo Nordisk for data on their website usage. We would also like to thank Pippa Armbrester for quick and careful copyediting and Pranay Bose for a careful analysis of reporting by some large pharmaceutical companies, which analysis we now want to use in a separate publication, and Eric Hermann of Workiva, formerly WebFilings, for his graphical expertise that was much needed for some of the figures. Stacey Rivera, our development editor, provided just the right mix of discipline and support to ensure the timely delivery of a book that met her quality standards.

We appreciate financial support from the Harvard Business School for some of the research on which this book is based. We would also like to thank fellow movement member Professor George Serafeim, also of the Harvard Business School, for his intellectual contributions and moral support in so many ways. He too is someone we look forward to working with in the years ahead in terms of both ideas and actions.

Finally, words alone cannot express the gratitude we have to our wives Anne Laurin Eccles and Marilyn Mueller Krzus for their love, encouragement, and moral support. Since this is our second book, they knew full well what lay ahead for them until the book was done. Now that it is, we look forward to giving them back at least some of the time they gave to us.