Where Are the Great Companies?

Where are the companies and organizations that live the mission of making the world a better place, every day, in a big way?

Of course I googled it. All you can tell from that is that's their stated mission.  How do you find the companies that truly are LIVING it, where it's in their organizational DNA?  Speak!

I'm not asking for some lofty or rhetorical reason...I'm simply avoiding what I should be doing right now: prepping to meet with my colleagues on the Goodstone Group leadership team tomorrow, we each have to show up having considered the questions that I usually ask others, and rarely think about for myself, like "What matters most to me at this chapter in my life?"

Ok. Rather than work on that, which is important and good, I started a bit of avoidance behavior:  would I ever go back to a role in a large organization's leadership?  Geez, I love what I do, and do it well, and it's what I was meant to do. Yet I'm designed for other stuff too. From coaching to doing...

I think--or maybe I hope--I'd be a much better leader now than I was when, in my early 30's (a decade and a half ago! wow!), I became an executive at Schwab. I was newly sober, newly transitioned from consulting to doing, and frankly, was very rough around the edges.

What's different now, though, is I'd only be able to help lead a company that's living the mission of trying to make the world a better place, because that's what I'm trying to do as an executive coach, and by writing this blog.

Where are THOSE companies? 

Write me if you know the answer, and I should get back to my prework!

David Peck
The Recovering Leader

Comments

[Bruno Sarda]

This is a topic near and dear to my heart now that I work in Corporate Responsibility at Dell.
There are many lists, some better than others. A good place to start is Corporate Responsibility magazine's list of top 100 corporate citizens: http://www.thecro.com/content/corporate-responsibility-magazine%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9C100-best-corporate-citizens-list%E2%80%9D

Interestingly, the question of leadership aligns well with companies that rank high in corporate responsibility, as employee engagement and the ability of leadership to create and sustain that engagement are key.
There are also quantifiable proof points: for example, the companies in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index systematically outperform the DJIA and S&P 500, as do companies that qualify for Carbon Disclosure Project's Climate Leaders, etc...
All in all, data points to the fact that large companies that do good, do better.