Five CSR Rankings Compared

CSR ranking confession: I tricked you! Or more accurately, I tricked myself. I recently asked you to guess the only company to be recognized by the 2009 Best Corporate Citizens, 2009 Most Ethical Companies, 2009 Newsweek Green Rankings (top 100 companies), 2010 Global 100 by Corporate Knights, and the 2010 Global ESG 100 by RiskMetrics Group. It turns out, however, that there is, in fact, NO COMPLETE CONSENSUS. Upon double-checking my work, I figured out that the one company that I had thought made all five lists was, in fact, not mentioned in the Most Ethical Citizens. My apologies to anybody I confused through my last post on this subject.

So without further ado, below please find the results of my (double-checked) analysis. While no company made all five lists, 11 were recognized by four of the five, an additional 24 by three, and yet another 87 by 2.

Please note that although there was no consensus between the five groups, I did identify eight companies recognized by all three global (as opposed to U.S.-specific) rankings. These companies--- Danone (food), Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (shipping), Novo Nordisk (healthcare), Novozymes (bio-industrial products), Ricoh (electronics), Sompo Japan Insurance (obvious), Vodafone (mobile network), and Westpac (banking), indeed deserve recognition for this accomplishment.

I feel a bit like Sisyphus, because as I post this analysis, my results are already outdated. The CRO unveiled its 2010 Best Corporate Citizens the other day, so stay tuned for an updated analysis comparing that CSR ranking to the other four we have explored so far.