The tide of external assessments, league tables and corporate ratings seems endless. A sign of the continuing demand for accountability? A powerful way to repair the breakdown in trust? Or just a pain for hard-pressed CSR managers?
It’s possible to be very cynical at the unstoppable flow of initiatives that purport to assess companies. Anyone with an axe to grind or a cause to push has developed their own system, or so it seems.
Indeed, a quick count in this edition shows that fully one story in five has some sort of measurement or rating aspect.
Full marks to SustainAbility, then, for its ‘rate the raters’ project, supported by companies such as Abbott, Brown-Forman, ExxonMobil and GSK. As we report, this is working to understand better this growing trend and uncover what will enhance the usefulness and credibility of rating systems.
Also in this edition, Megan De Young offers five useful pointers to the hard-pressed CSR and sustainability manager trying to cope with the deluge – in short, pick the ones that matter to you and your stakeholders, and engage to get the assessment right.
One complication is that some of these initiatives are not based on objective facts or measurement at all, but on perceptions – and that makes the ‘most admired’ type-surveys much harder to influence or correct.
But the biggest concern is one first posed in Plato’s Republic: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? As Homer’s daughter put it (that’s Lisa, from The Simpsons, for readers with more modern cultural reference points) “If you’re the police, who will police the police?”
Good question, for which neither axe grinders nor genuine assessors have a ready answer. The advice must surely be: disclose your methodology, engage with companies being assessed, and debate the findings openly. That at least will help ensure the insights these things provide can help understand future value creation and genuine sustainability, rather than just a backward-looking name-and-shame exercise based on past performance.
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