Cfo Thought Leader

Sometime in the next three to six months, Syngenta AG, a Swiss-based agribusiness company, is expecting to welcome a clan of ambitious offspring. Months, even years in the making, these fruit from a forward-looking group are born from a cross-functional team—one tasked with helping the $13.5 billion enterprise correctly measure its expansive sustainability initiatives. To be clear, the aforementioned "offspring" are new metrics, the output of an ambitious metrics "refresh" triggered in part by the firm's determination to routinely evaluate the numbers intended to provide Syngenta management as well stakeholders with a clear-eyed view of its sustainability efforts. "It's all good and well establishing a new metric, but if you can't measure and monitor it, then it has no value in any shape or form," explains Syngenta CFO Mark Patrick, who first mentioned the sustainability "refresh" when asked about metrics that had become increasingly top-of-mind for finance—but were clearly "nonfinancial" or beyond the realm