2012
Join us for McBassi 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.”
2012
Does your company make the grade?
I recently blogged on Glassdoor.com about the importance of your company doing business in an “all-win” way. Your career may depend on it!
Interested in what your company’s grade might be? Try our fun, interactive new self-assessment and find out instantly.
2011
Where to shop this holiday season?
Glad you asked! To help identify companies worthy of your shopping dollars this holiday season, we created the 2011 Good Company Retail Index. It ranks 52 of the largest retailers in the US, assessing how they treat employees, customers, and the planet.
Each company’s score reflects its most recent performance on three measurements (these represent a subset of the full range of metrics we used to calculate Good Company scores in the book, and includes updated scores on each of the three):
- Glassdoor.com rankings (employees’ assessments of their companies as employers)
- wRatings scores (customers’ opinions of companies on quality, fair price, and trust)
- 2011 Newsweek Green Rankings (assess companies’ environmental footprint, management of that footprint, and transparency)
The big winner? Apple, whose top ranking reflects not only an excellent track record on customer satisfaction, but positive employee feedback at Glassdoor and a top 10 percent score on the Green Rankings.
The full top 10 list is as follows:
1. Apple
2. Ace Hardware
3 (tie). Dell
3 (tie). Office Depot
3 (tie). Staples
6. Whole Foods Market
7. Lowe’s
8. The Home Depot
9. O’Reilly Automotive
10. Costco
Bringing up the rear? Dillard’s, RadioShack, and Big Lots. Dillard’s scored in the bottom quarter of the Green Rankings, failed to impress customers in wRatings research, and earned a “dissatisfied” rating from employees at Glassdoor.
So enjoy the holiday season – and while you’re at it, consider doing business with those companies that have demonstrated they’re worthy of your business.
Click to go to full 2011 Good Company Retail Index scores.
This post also appeared on the Good Company blog.
2011
Good Company blog launches today
Check it out at http://www.goodcompanyindex.com/blogcommunity/. Please do keep an eye on it (and feel free to participate in the conversation) in the coming days and weeks!
2011
The payoffs to being a good company
This year, our sister company Bassi Investments (a registered investment advisory firm) enters its tenth year of managing portfolios based on many of the concepts we’ve outlined in our forthcoming book (Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era).
By and large, these portfolios knock the socks off the S&P 500, the standard performance benchmark. (In the spirit of full disclosure, one portfolio has slightly underperformed the market: an experimental one based on a particularly narrow concept of human capital management.)
Our longest running portfolio, which we launched in December 2001, has outperformed the S&P 500 by 40 percentage points since inception, before fees. (In the graph below, the Bassi Investments portfolio is the top line and the S&P 500, excluding dividends, is the bottom line).
As registered investment advisors, we must add the important disclaimer that past performance is no guarantee of future results. Additional information is available by contacting Bassi Investments.
In Chapter 5 of Good Company, we review this and other “hard-nosed” evidence on whether it pays to be a good company. The answer? A strong YES.
(This post was sent via email to our monthly newsletter subscribers last week. Click here if you’d like to subscribe.)
2011
Environmental impact of great importance to prospective employees
The findings from a newly released survey indicate that a company’s environmental impact is as important a consideration as the company’s profitability to people when they are considering a new job. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed report that “a company’s impact on the environment is vital when evaluating a new workplace, and 61 percent say the same about the company’s profit margin.”
This finding is consistent with a great deal of other evidence that we explore in our forthcoming book (Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era, to be released on Labor Day). One of our key findings is that the stock performance of companies that succeed on multiple fronts – those that are good to their employees, customers, communities, and the environment – outperform their less worthy counterparts (roughly ‘the bad guys’). If you’d like a sneak preview of the book, we’d be happy to send you a copy of Chapter 1 – please just send your request via email to info@mcbassi.com.
2011
Good Company now available for pre-order
Exciting news as the publication process for our book continues to move right along: Good Company will be released on Labor Day 2011, and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com and at other booksellers.
2011
A business decision with social benefit
Today’s New York Times describes a terrific and heartening example of what we are talking about in our forthcoming book, Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era.
In a new joint venture, PepsiCo buys corn directly from small farmers (most of whom are very poor) – rather than go through a middleman. “The social benefits of the corn program are obvious in higher incomes that have improved nutritional and educational standards among the participating farmers, not to mention its impact on illegal immigration and possibly even the reduction of marijuana production.”
PepsiCo, in turn, enjoys lower transportation costs for crops and is able to purchase the type of corn that is best suited for its products. According to Gaurav Gupta of Dalberg Global Development Advisors, “We are seeing an increased focus by companies looking to see how they can use their core capabilities for public good rather than simply writing a big check. They’re starting to realize that the marginal cost of doing a little extra good produces such a great impact — and not only in terms of good will, but also because it’s good for business.”
This is one of the defining attributes of “good companies.” They look for win-wins that are good for business and good for the communities in which they do business.
2010
Hollywood, Twitter, and good sellers
One of the major themes of our new book Good Company is that multiple forces – including the power of social networking - are driving companies to become better employers, sellers, and stewards.
Better sellers can be trusted to offer high-quality goods and services to their customers at fair prices.
Earlier this week, the New York Times explored a related phenomenon in the movie industry, noting that the avalanche of Twitter reviews seems to have ended the “era of using marketing to trick consumers into seeing bad movies.”
In short, movie studios are increasingly being driven to be better sellers – or closer to “good company,” in our parlance.
2010
The real reason HP’s CEO got the boot?
The recent forced resignation of Mark Hurd, the (ex) CEO of Hewlett-Packard, came as a shock to many. The stated reasons didn’t quite add up: some expense account irregularities and an alleged (but unproven) allegation of sexual harassment by an HP contractor. Hurd was widely viewed as a highly effective CEO, especially by Wall Street, because of his legendary focus on cost cutting and revenue growth.
Given this apparently stellar performance, many questioned the wisdom of the board’s decision to oust Hurd. For example, on August 9, the New York Times reported that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison submitted an “impassioned e-mail” to the Times in which he “chided HP’s board for what he said was a grave mistake.”
But subsequently, Joe Nocera’s August 13 NYT column speculates that Hurd was actually removed for a variety of other reasons, which Nocera sums up as “putting up dazzling short-term numbers that have the effect of enriching himself while robbing HP’s future.” The column explores in detail employees’ intense dislike of Hurd; how he decimated HP’s legendary investments in R& D in exchange for short-term gain, and Hurd’s likely involvement in HP’s shameful spying on both its board members and journalists. One former employee is quoted as saying that Hurd was “wrecking our image, personally demeaning us, and chopping our future.”
The analysis we’ve been compiling for Good Company: The New Economics of People, Profit and Planet, is consistent with this image of Hurd - and Nocera’s explanation for his departure. As a part of our research, we have been using data available through Glassdoor.com to explore the relationship between employees’ ratings of their CEO’s (along with broader measures of being a “good employer”) and stock performance.
Here’s what we wrote in our draft of Chapter 6 of Good Company (dated May 14, 2010):
“One of the notable names that employees rate in the bottom one-eighth of employers [on Glassdoor.com] is Hewlett-Packard, a company that has a long and proud tradition of being an enlightened and forward-thinking employer. But under the leadership of its most recent CEO, Mark Hurd, big changes have been made.
One interpretation of Hewlett-Packard’s low employee rating is that its employees had long been coddled, and that by putting an end to that, Hurd has put the firm on a path to sustainable long-term profitability. (This is a view that tends to be favored by Wall-Street-analyst-types.) Or it may be that by hacking away at employee perks and privileges, Hurd has weakened Hewlett-Packard’s ability to sustain itself in the future. Only time will tell. But what can be said with certainty is that employees’ rating of Hewlett-Packard puts it at the bottom of the distribution on Glassdoor.com, and the firm’s long tradition of relying on its employees as a major source of sustainable advantage has been called into question.
Here’s something else that can be said with certainty. The employee-provided ratings available on Glassdoor.com are highly correlated with firms’ stock performance. When we compared Fortune 100 firms within the same industry, and controlled for other factors (through multiple regression analysis), the most consistent factor associated with higher stock performance over 3 years and 5 years is Glassdoor.com ratings. Put another way, the higher the Glassdoor.com rating, the higher the stock performance over 3 years and 5 years, controlling for all other factors.”
The situation helps to confirm what we at McBassi & Company have long known to be true—that there is a great deal of wisdom in the workforce, and sites like Glassdoor provide a window into that wisdom. Boards of directors and Wall Street analysts would be well served by tapping into that wisdom with much greater frequency.