Why Weren't We at the Top ?

C-suite executives are becoming increasingly interested in how their organization fares in sustainability awards and rankings.

In the last few weeks I have participated in discussions on various rankings and methodologies for assessing the sustainability credentials of a company. The context varies considerably from a closed group of corporations developing a scorecard type methodology for their own use to a media company and investor analyst who work together to publish a yearly ranking. With such a broad scope out there, where should the C-suite and the sustainability team be focusing their attention ?

BT has faired fairly well in these various recognition initiatives. Last Wednesday, November 25th, BT won the ‘Green Award’ at this year’s World Communications Awards (WCA) in London. As I posted in October, Gartner included BT very favorably in a report on the greenest IT vendors worldwide. In September the company won one of Oracle’s 2008 'Empower The Green Enterprise' awards and earlier in that same month was named Global Super Sector Leader for the telecommunications sector of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the eighth year running. This alone illustrates the broad scope of organizations running such initiatives.

The interest in rankings is considerable right now. In speaking with colleagues in other companies, I know that c-suite executives in many companies want to know why their company is sometimes overlooked or further down the rankings than they expected. But even some large companies are finding it hard to resource all the different requests for information required by some of these ranking programs.

The different awards and rankings programs serve different purposes and over the Thanksgiving break I had some time to reflect on the differences. In some forthcoming posts I plan to comment on some thoughts from my involvement.