2013
“Good Seller = Great Performance” webinar now available for viewing
If you were unable to join us for last week’s webinar by Laurie Bassi and Bob Sherlock on “Good Seller = Great Performance,” the recording can be viewed below at your leisure:
2013
Join us for upcoming webinar on Good Seller
Join Laurie Bassi and Bob Sherlock for our January 2013 webinar “Good Seller = Great Performance.”
We know from the research behind Good Company that being a Good Seller pays off. Companies that systematically do the right thing as sellers achieve greater financial success. That’s because the good opinion of your company’s key constituencies – especially customers and prospect – matters a great deal to enterprise value.
But what if your company isn’t yet performing as well as you’d like in this area? How can you affect how customers and prospects feel about your company?
In this brief, focused webinar, McBassi CEO Laurie Bassi, teams up with strategic marketer Bob Sherlock to review how to assess where you are and build greater Brand Preference for your company:
- A simple framework for assessing your current degree of brand strength, and for building on that foundation
- How to get customers and prospects to recognize the Worthiness your company already exhibits
- Moves you can make to better stand out in your marketplace
Date and time: Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 11:00 am to 12:00 noon EST.
Space is limited – register today!
2012
Join us for upcoming webinar on “How to Get to Good”
Don’t miss Laurie Bassi and JJ Jordan in November as part of our Good Company webinar series: “Good Company = Great Performance: How to ‘Get to Good.’”
The world’s leading companies already understand: to produce sustainably great results, they have to be a good company.
In this dynamic webinar you will explore and learn:
- How the best companies beat the competition by being good employers, sellers and stewards
- Just how good is your company, really?
- How your company can “change for good” – and stay that way
For your convenience, the webinar is being offered at two different times:
- Tuesday, November 27, 2012, 3:00 to 4:00 pm EST
- Wednesday, November 28, 2012, 11:00 am to 12:00 noon EST
Space is limited – click here to register today!
2012
Exciting news
We were all thrilled to learn that Good Company won the 2012 Nautilus Gold Award for best business/leadership book of the year. We sincerely thank the Nautilus judges for their consideration.
2012
New interview with Laurie Bassi
World HR Net recently interviewed Good Company co-author Laurie Bassi about the origins of Good Company, measurement of human capital, employee productivity, and much more.
You can read the full interview here.
2012
Three things you must get right to be a good employer
I just posted a blog over at ASTD.org discussing the three things we describe in the book that your organization MUST get right in order to be a good employer.
2012
ASTD blog posts
We’re delighted to announce that Good Company co-author Laurie Bassi will be writing a periodic series of blog posts about Good Company topics on the ASTD website.
Her first post is available here.
2012
Join us for webinar: “It Pays to Be Good!”
Wondering how Disney, FedEx, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Abbott, and other companies are making “goodness” pay off?
Please join us next Tuesday, March 13, 2012, at 2:00 p.m. EST, for a dynamic McBassi webinar featuring authors Laurie Bassi (Good Company and HR Analytics Handbook) and Jim Shaffer (The Leadership Solution), facilitated by Dave Basarab. You’ll leave with:
- Hard-nosed evidence that good companies outperform their competitors.
- Insights into the convergence of forces giving rise to the new rules for business success.
- Understanding of the 6 systems that underpin Good Company results.
- The strategic framework to integrate Good Company principles and practices into ongoing efforts to improve your company’s performance.
- Ways to sustain the gains rather than create just another “program of the day.”
2011
U.S. investors ARE interested in sustainable profits
In Good Company, we argue that increasing transparency is forcing companies to behave better as employers, sellers and stewards. This argument, we realize, may strike some as naïve. If all investors care about is short-run returns, then it’s hard to see how more worthy corporate behavior can become the norm. After all, ”short-termism” has chewed up and spit out many CEOs who attempted to do the right thing in terms of generating long-term sustainable profits, but failed to meet Wall Street’s short-term profit expectations.
But there is good news on this front: U.S. investors are showing a high level of interest in integrated reporting which involves the “integration of a company’s required financial report with its voluntary (except for a few countries) corporate social responsibility or sustainability report.”
In an impressive analysis of investors’ interests – based on crunching 34 million hits of Bloomberg data on firms’ environmental and social performance indicators, along with data from Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) – Robert Eccles and George Serafeim classify twenty-three countries into one of four categories:
- Sustainable countries – where there is “a high degree of integrated reporting by companies and a high level of investor interest in the respective nonfinancial performance metrics”
- Unsustainable countries – where there is “very little interest by investors in nonfinancial performance metrics”
- Sustainable companies countries – where there is “a high degree of integrated reporting by companies but very little interest by investors in nonfinancial performance metrics”
- Sustainable investors countries – where there is “very little integrated reporting by companies but a high degree of interest by investors in nonfinancial performance metrics ”
Eccles and Serafeim find that U.S. investors have a relatively high degree of interest in integrated reporting, and hence they classify U.S. investors as “sustainable.” This calls into question the assertion by many executives that U.S. investors have no interest in long-term, sustainable profits.
However, the U.S. ranks lowest of the 23 countries analyzed in the degree to which companies are using integrated reporting, suggesting that there is still a long way to go to meet investors’ interest in a more sustainable focus in reporting and behavior generally.
2011
The Good Company Index: how we got there
One of the central elements of Good Company is our Good Company Index™, in which we rate companies on their behavior as employer, seller, and steward of the community and environment.
Thinking back, it’s possible we co-authors spent more time debating and constructing this rating system than we did on any other part of the book. (And believe me, we devoted a long time to some other parts too, so that’s really saying something!)
Most fundamentally, the Index rating reflects our views about what constitutes a good employer, a good seller, and a good steward. (After defining those characteristics, we were delighted to find that they also proved to be associated with stronger stock performance – a finding we’ll explore in more detail in future blog entries.)
Once we settled on those characteristics, we set out to find data that would tell us how good (or not-so-good) was the behavior of companies in each of those areas. We sought data that ideally had all of the following attributes:
- Closely reflected the characteristics we had defined
- Reliable and of high quality
- Available for a large number of companies
- Timely
- Publicly available
There were certainly some areas where we were delighted by the data options available. We’re big fans of the information available on Glassdoor.com, which publishes employee ratings of their employers.
That’s a core component of our “good employer” rankings. And the Newsweek Green Rankings, a key element in our “good steward” scores, are very impressive in their comprehensive ranking of the environmental footprint (and management of that footprint) among the 500 largest publicly-traded companies in the United States.
Reflecting the early stage of much of this work, however, it turns out there were significant obstacles in capturing information in many of the areas we wanted to rank.
In some areas, no data existed at all and we had to decide whether it was possible to create our own database, or whether it would simply be impossible to measure a given area. (After telling ourselves for months that surely a consolidated list of major government-imposed fines and penalties must exist, we finally yielded and ended up creating our own database, largely through manual company-by-company searches across multiple government websites.)
And not surprisingly, even many of the good data sources focus on large companies only. (In fact, this was such a significant factor in so many categories that we made the decision to limit our 2011 rankings to only the publicly-traded companies listed in the Fortune 100 – the largest 100 companies in the United States.)
In one area (customer rankings of companies that could be compared across industries), we became convinced that the best source of data was from a company called wRatings, which – unfortunately for our purposes – did not make its data publicly-available. Fortunately, however, their CEO Gary Williams kindly agreed to work with us to use their data to construct a “Good Seller” index, and allowed us to publish the results for the Fortune 100.
In the end, we’re pleased with the index we created. At the same time, however, we recognize it’s still just a first step. We fully expect it to become more robust (and available for a larger number of companies), in the years ahead.
Stay tuned – over the next few weeks, we’ll explore in more detail how we actually assigned scores to companies on their behaviors as employer, seller, and steward.