2012
New Good Company rankings: a quick look at Disney
Below is an excerpt from our recently-released report “2012 Good Company Index: It (Still) Pays to Be Good.”
As Time Warner has gone to the head of the class, Disney has moved back to the middle of the pack. The entertainment giant, our top-ranked company in 2011, saw its Good Company Index™ grade fall from an A, the top score in the inaugural ranking, to a C+. Disney’s performance as an employer continued to be solid, but its rating as a seller slipped and its marks as a steward dropped dramatically. For instance, it didn’t earn any points in our new categories of political accountability and ethics.
Disney was also dinged for excessive CEO pay. We consider extravagant CEO pay to be a sign of lack of restraint and against the spirit of good corporate stewardship. According to a New York Times study of top executive compensation, Disney CEO Robert Iger raked in $31.4 million in 2011—placing him in the top 5 among CEOs in the Fortune 100 firms we ranked. (As it happens, Disney had flirted with losing a point on our inaugural Good Company Index for its CEO pay: it ranked sixth, with Iger’s 2009 compensation of $21.6 million coming in just behind the $21.9 million pay of fifth ranked Abbott Laboratories CEO Miles White.)
We do not mean to declare that Disney has gone from being a “good” company to a “bad” one. But the firm that claims to operate the “happiest place on earth” appears to have work to do to make all of its stakeholders happy.
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