The Goodness 500
A new website attempts to quantify good, but the numbers don't add up.
The Goodness 500 has a premise we at DLB can agree with: help consumers find the most socially responsible companies in an aesthetically pleasing way.
However, looking at the companies in their rankings, I question their definition of good. There are quite a few companies I wouldn’t think to see on this list, particularly the large number of financial institutions.
The rankings appear to be gleaned from several public reports on charity donations, equality, and environmental policy. These issues are important, but don’t tell the whole story. What company would allow itself to look bad on one of those reports when anyone (like Goodness) can easily look up such numbers? Donate some money, follow the rules, and everything looks fine. Meanwhile, the company might use child labor or issue bogus loans. Much more difficult to look up.
What’s missing is the ethical dimension. I’d like to see a Goodness 500 that really quantifies trust and fairness, not the Goodness-On-Paper 500…
| Tagged with: | Business, Design Ethics, Trust |
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Comments on this post
1.
Hi DLB!
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on Goodness500. I wanted to clarify that we don’t actually rank the most socially responsible companies in the world (which would likely include tons of innovative social enterprises). Instead, we rank the largest publicly publicly traded companies based on how “good” they are compared to their peers. The thinking behind our approach goes something like this: if we can encourage the most powerful companies in the world to be more socially responsible, even modest improvements in their business practices can impact billions of people around the world.
We could not agree more that including additional factors in the index would produce a better reflection of a company’s corporate responsibility. In fact, we always appreciate tips on new sources of publicly available data. While it’s not easy to quantify “trust and fairness,” we’ll continue trying our best. For example, we hope over the coming years to add all sorts factors like human rights policies, labor standards across the supply chain, greenhouse gas emissions, codes of conduct, occupational health and safety, anti-corruption policies, investment principles, water use, third-party verification, and more. Improving corporate transparency is a challenge we must work together to overcome.
From our perspective, CSR rankings should not be the end of the conversation, but rather the beginning. We hope we can continue to make corporate social responsibility more accessible and consumer-friendly and bring a more diverse group of stakeholders into the conversation.
Thanks,
Goodness500.org
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