Research Paper on:
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AT SHELL: A CASE STUDY

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
by Jane Wei-Skillern, is from the Harvard Business School (revised July 6, 2004). Identification of the Problem Like many energy companies, Shell  regularly undergoes scrutiny and media attention as the worldwide need for energy and new energy resources consistently runs into the environmentalists demand that such sources not be obtained at the  expense of wildlife or the environment. This became especially prevalent for Shell during the mid to late 1990s. At that time, according to Shell executives, "the world was moving from  a trust me to a show me world . . ." (3). Basically, people were less willing to take the comments of authorities (such as government) as a given, and  there was increasing call for corporations to be transparent in all aspects, from financial to corporate information. Basically, "top managers at Shell recognized that the company was being held accountable  not only for its financial performance, but for its environmental and social performance as well" (3). Given this, in 1997, the Sustainable Development Group, a corporate-level group, developed a five-year  "roadmap" to create and integrate practices highlighting sustainable development into the company. The information was transmitted to company stakeholders (employees, investors and  others) through an annual document known as the Shell Report. By 2001, the data in the Shell Report had three levels of  scope. The first involved a comprehensive (and time-consuming) verification process that would review systems used to "generate, aggregate and report" various data at all levels of Shell -- in other  words, the group, business and operating unit levels (5). The second verification process was focused on examining both the systems and