In fact, corporate ethics have become a topic of growing interest in recent years, even sparking new centers of academic research, such as the Kennedy School’s Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative, the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, and the Center for Responsible Business at the University of California Berkeley.
It would therefore seem that when newspapers or other organizations attempt to rank the best companies in their regions, they should take into account at least some corporate responsibility or ethics measures.
In fact, that’s what The London Sunday Times does when it publishes an annual Corporate Responsbility Index, which is compiled by a nonprofit, UK-based organization called Business in the Community. The 2006 CR Index was published by The Times earlier this month. The Index ranks the 100 most “responsible” companies in Britain based on measures of environmental and social impact. The ranking process is a rigorous one that requires companies to fill out a survey that takes up to two months to complete, and requires site visits to the firms and internal auditing.
The CR Index surveys companies on a range of social and environmental issues. Companies are asked, for instance, whether they have a certified environmental management system in place that meets the requirements of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), an international standard-setting body, and whether they ask their suppliers to provide information on their environmental performance. They are asked about their workplace safety measures and other initiatives for the well-being of their employees. They are also asked about how they engage the marketplace, including the safety of their products and the amount of product information and labelling they provide.
I asked The Globe for comment as to whether it would make their own rating system more comprehensive if the paper were to include at least some of the corporate social responsibility measures used in the CR Index.
Caleb Solomon, The Globe’s business editor in charge of The Globe 100 (and who has just been appointed a deputy managing editor for Page One), responded with the following statement:
These are all important and interesting subjects. It’s difficult to see how
to incorporate them into the existing Globe 100, which gives us the opportunity to rank companies across industries based on the same financial measures. But augmenting our coverage with some social measures is something we’re looking at.
I also thought it might be useful to get a comment on the topic from the Kennedy School’s CSRI prople, Boston College’s CCC, and the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. I contacted all three, but no one responded.
Great topic, Dave. I have personal experience once removed with Biogen, and I can assure you that, as advertised, this ranking does not incorporate any ethics measures. Biogen merged with a CA company a few years ago, supposedly a merger of equals. Soo thereafter, Biogen-Idec did a hideous hack job, laying off people based on paper duties, not based on knowledge store or activity on ongoing projects (which frequently does not show up on paper). It was a classic case of business types making what boils down to scientific decisions. Fiasco was the result. Prior to that, Biogen was an enviable place to work, stocked with great brains and a great company culture. Perhaps this is why they were so sucessful getting $-making stuff to market. The hack job ended that. Many people who left had no idea what they were supposed to be working on, there were no plans or goals, their teams had been decimated and scattered, etc. etc. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. A company can turn a profut on the backs of it’s past employees and future prospects. That might rank it in the top 100 based on short-term stock price. But long term? Buyer beware if you don’t know what the corporate culture was and now, tragically, is.
That sounds like an interesting and telling example. It appears to support the argument that corporate responsibility and financial viability (particularly long-term viability) are not mutually exclusive. Companies that are good to their workers, their customers, and society in general may indeed be the ones that survive and prosper the most over time.
that biogen did not survive. at least, not the highly vaunted biogen culture that used to make it a great producer and a great place to work. there still is a company with the name ‘biogen’ and some of the old employees, but the real biogen is dead and gone. but on paper, i;m sure it looks great, perhaps even better than when it was an enviable place to work. yes, ethical practices can make a company great, but greed, ego and market pressures seem to eventually pull it into the dust. biogen isn’t the only or most recent biotech this has happened to. don’t get me started on Icos, which the CEO killed for blood money to the tune of $68 million. he set the stage for the eli lilly take-over. all eli lilly wanted was Icos’s Cialis patent. when they got that, they disbanded Icos, a thriving biotech with a super culture, lots of promising drugs in the pipeline, and a cornerstone of Seattle biotech industry. but hey, eli lilly got the pearl, so who cares about all that ethics crap! bitter? naaaah!