A recent article in The Economist argues that quotas used by some European countries to increase the numbers of women on corporate boards are the wrong way to promote women.

While I take issue with the article, the subject of quotas stirs up discomfort.  Opponents say quotas are a bad idea for companies headquartered in the United States because they would undermine corporate governance, dilute the caliber of board members, and insult woman currently sitting on boards.

However the gap is addressed, the problem remains that the U.S. is not showing any leadership in gender diversity on boards. This raises questions about what it can learn from other countries.

Gender should never be the only reason someone is nominated to serve on a corporate board. Statistics show a long-established pattern of qualified white males who have defined the province of corporate governance and corporate leadership for generations. How that pattern can be shifted to seek out and include many more qualified women and minority candidates is an urgent priority.  Progress has been far too slow.

In 2000, the representation of women on Fortune 500 boards was 11.7 percent. Ten years later that number inched up only four percentage points.  This was during a decade of heightened attention to the issue, as well as a proliferation of research by Catalyst, McKinsey and others on the business case for having women on boards. Bottom line: the needle barely moved.

It is hard to see how the recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) diversity disclosure rule will have much impact moving that needle. The new rule leaves it up to companies to explain how they consider diversity in identifying nominees. Gender diversity isn’t flagged as something the SEC would like included in what the company explains. They don’t send a message that it isn’t acceptable to have 15.7 percent women (white and minority) on boards.

Gender diversity is a global problem – 40 percent of the world’s largest publicly listed companies don’t have any women on their boards; when women do have board seats, they hold less than one in ten.

To address the gap in representation, in the last several years, many countries have been far more aggressive than the U.S. This has included imposing, or threatening to impose, quotas to increase the representation of women on boards to between 20 to 40 percent  in companies in Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, The Netherlands, France, Italy and Spain.

Norway’s quota required that publicly-held companies raise the percentage of women on boards from 9 percent in 2006 to 40 percent by 2008; a very ambitious target in a very short window. A University of Michigan study makes the case that forced diversity in Norway hurt stock price. In the three days following the announcement of the quota, stock prices fell 5 percent for companies that had no women directors. Cited as a reason why quotas don’t work, it is too soon to know the full impact of Norway’s actions to increase the representation of women on boards. There are also many other ways to create and implement quotas. More study is needed.

In both the United Kingdom and Germany, companies are being asked to voluntarily increase gender diversity on boards with the caveat that government may step in if companies don’t succeed. Kuala Lampur’s approach has been in two phases: over a five-year period, they increased the percent of women leaders in the public sector to 30 percent; then in May 2011, they passed a requirement that over the next five years, companies  will ensure that women make up 30 percent of corporate decision makers.

Quotas to increase gender diversity on corporate boards or in public office have the common denominator of trying to address substantial underrepresentation not resolved in a business-as-usual approach.

"Whether it is women in elective office, women judges, or women on boards, the evidence is overwhelming that increasing the numbers of women in the pipeline is insufficient to overcome women's barriers to office,” says Sally J. Kenney, Executive Director, Newcomb College Institute and Professor of Political Science Newcomb College Endowed Chair, Tulane University.  According to Kenney:

“That is why, from Rwanda to Egypt to Latin America, nations have adopted electoral quotas to increase the number of women in legislative office. Just as it is no longer defensible to deny women the vote, the right to serve on juries, or the right to practice their profession and participate in the governance of professional associations, so too, do basic principles of democracy, representation, and nondiscrimination require that women serve on corporate boards."

One of the reasons given for the paucity of women and minorities on boards is difficulty in finding them. Agenda developed nearly a year ago a resource for nominating committees called, “A Guide to Board Diversity".  The guide includes backgrounds on 100 candidates vetted by a panel of governance experts. Agenda hasn’t done a follow-up survey yet to learn whether inclusion in the guide got candidates interviews or invitations for board service. However, if they do, it will be very telling to learn how many Fortune 1000 companies pursued any of the 100 candidates.

I am concerned that there is complacency, even smugness, about how we view corporate governance in the U.S. that lacks urgency in dealing with the under-representation of women and minorities on boards. Without outside pressure from the SEC, a prestigious commission, or even the threat of a quota, I don’t see the momentum for change that will put sufficient value on the contributions of talented, qualified women and minorities to aggressively recruit them.

Ten years from now, will our progress be measured in coffee spoons?  In 2021 will there be those who rationalize that moving the needle up four more points, to 19.7 percent representation is an achievement?

And for those companies in Europe that have worked to achieve 30 percent or even 40 percent representation of women (white and minorities) by 2021, what will they have discovered about the strength of diversity? About the value of gender, ethnicity, background, perspectives, talent, and experience – and how it impacts financial return and culture – that will be still beyond our reach?

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

Leadership journeys often begin by admiring someone else’s leadership style or ability —asking what makes that person successful. Once that process starts, soul searching is unavoidable. How do you stack up to the kind of leader you want to be and what will it take for you to close the gap?

Indeed, the reason there are so many studies, books, theories and workshops on leadership is that as long as we are responsible for results, we face huge challenges that require skills and competencies, vision and innovation. At the core, there are questions about our abilities:  How do we learn to listen to, engage, and inspire others to do their best work? How do we lead ourselves through the inevitable obstacles?

Leadership isn’t just about becoming a CEO. According to Joanna Barsh, a director at McKinsey, only about 35 percent of men and 25 percent of women aspire to a top role in a company. However, whatever one’s professional aspiration, leadership skills are likely required.

Acquiring those skills often isn’t easy for men or women, says Barsh, whom I spoke with recently.  But for women who pursue careers in companies, there is the daunting reality that unless you start your own business, a leadership role can be hard to come by.

For example, at Fortune 500 companies, the percent of women executive officers is 14.4 percent, less than 3 percent are CEOs, and women constitute 15 percent of corporate directors. (In Asia, women occupy 1.8 percent of board seats and in Europe, 12 percent.)

Finding Magic

About seven years ago, Barsh began the Leadership Project – which evolved into the Centered Leadership Project -- to answer a question important to her: “What made other women so wonderfully successful as leaders?” She figured there was some “magic” that if she could find out for herself and pass on to others, she and other women could go further, have a bigger impact and feel fulfilled.

“Imagine,” she wrote in the introduction of her book, published two years ago, “how many more women would make it to the top because these secrets would help them.” How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life, co-authored with her McKinsey colleague Susie Cranston, will be released in paperback in December with a new forward.

The book was the result of videotaped interviews with 100 women leaders around the world who shared stories about how they looked at life and work: how they found  purpose; the optimism and confidence they express; how they overcame obstacles; their openness to feedback and taking criticism; how they approached their career and unexpected opportunities; how they cultivated a sponsor, connected to others, and brought out others’ talents; how they made things happen for themselves and found their voice, and how they recovered from adversity and restored their energy.

McKinsey’s Living Portraits Video Archive,  gives a flavor of the stories told by women leaders all over the world.

As the McKinsey team looked for answers about why the women interviewed shared certain traits, they took into account, and built off, research done by others on leadership, positive psychology, search for meaning, energy and performance, gender differences, networking and bonding, and risk-taking. They also conducted their own extensive quantitative research on men and women to test their hypotheses about centered leadership. The leadership model that emerged has five dimensions: meaning, framing, connecting, engaging and energizing

I asked Barsh whether what she had learned in the five years of research leading up to the book had enabled her to find the “magic” in her own leadership journey. I was also curious about what had been happening with the concept of centered leadership since  the 2009 book was published.

In the last two years, Barsh indicates she has given 150 speeches and received anecdotal feedback consistent with research findings. She’s the recipient of emails from women saying “you’ve changed my life.” The book’s Facebook page posts ongoing research, information, and comments that support the work of centered leadership and reveals a growing fan population.

So far, McKinsey has offered two several-day programs teaching centered leadership for high-potential women leaders sent by their companies. From last fall to this month, 32 women have participated, of whom 11 have since been promoted, Barsh says.

In addition, 50 more video interviews have been conducted, including 17 with men leaders, and more surveys done of men and women executives which show, she says, that men have as much a chance as women to become a master of centered leadership (scoring in the top 20 percent of four or all five of the dimensions of the leadership model) and feel successful in their work and lives.

Mastering Centered Leadership

The men who develop mastery in centered leadership, Barsh says, are the best sponsors for women leaders. “Often women need somebody to push them; leaving their comfort zone is a lot like skydiving,” she says. “The type of sponsor you need will push you out of the plane. Fine to think it is a good idea to sky dive and get up in the plane, but it is a natural thing to want to hang on and not go out the door,” she adds. “This kind of sponsor pushes you out because he knows you can do it and is on the ground before you and spreads out a safety blanket in case you make a mistake.”

I asked her if that is what men need from sponsors? “Yes,” she says, “a good sponsor does this for men.” The challenge, she adds, is that sponsors tend to sponsor people who look like them; to sponsor someone who doesn’t is uncomfortable.

Yet that support makes the journey to the top more possible.

And what of Barsh’s own journey? She acknowledged she is by nature a pessimistic person. She regularly uses framing and reframing, she says, a technique in positive psychology, pioneered by Martin Seligman and utilized by the successful women leaders she interviewed. She is training herself to be an optimist, understanding and living into her strengths, she says. “I’m a living experiment in centered leadership,” she says.

Barsh is also careful to include enough of the work she loves in furthering centered leadership into the mix of her regular consulting responsibilities which keeps her energy high. She comments that now she feels “in her flow.”

McKinsey is also doing research on how women are held back by culture, environment or policies and practices of a company not adaptive to the reality that women have a lot of responsibilities outside of work if they have families, Barsh says.

About the same time Barsh’s book hit bookstores, the American Association of University Professors' magazine published “So Few Women Leaders” based on a study at John Hopkins interviewing 27 senior women on their views of root causes why women are underrepresented in academic leadership positions. While not making claims of how representative these issues are and suggesting further study, the issues in the environment creating obstacles for women leaders in academia echo some of McKinsey’s research on corporate environment.

The problem of underrepresentation is further complicated. Recent studies by Mercer on Women’s Leadership Development surveys in U.S. and European companies indicate that around 70 percent of employers surveyed lack a strategy or philosophy for developing women into leadership roles, and around 40 percent don’t have any activities or programs targeted to the developmental needs of women leaders.

In many ways, that’s astonishing – after all, women make up about half the world’s population.  There’s substantial evidence that institutions that put a priority on developing talent from throughout the organization, especially mindful of under-representation of women and minorities in management and top roles, will inevitably create a stronger leadership pool and a stronger company.

So what happens while institutions catch up with where they need to be? The personal journey of leadership continues because it is also about leading oneself, even in environments that may not yet be hospitable. Books like How Remarkable Women Lead (and their valuable research) remind us of the roadmaps that support talented people in coming into their own as leaders- roadmaps that can help us unlock our own growth personally and professionally and accelerate our leadership journey.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

Consider that:

- Women hold about 15 percent of Fortune 500 board seats;

- Of the top 300 European companies, women make up about 12 percent of boards;

- In Asia, 1.8 percent of board slots are taken by women; and

- In Australia, women directors fill about 9 percent of corporate board seats.

Gender diversity in the boardroom is a global problem that over the last decade has gained momentum from a barrage of research from all over the world. The research continually points out the scope of the inequities, and raises more reasons why companies would be more successful if there were more female directors.

And as a rising tide does float all boats, the issue has broadened to include the disparity in ethnic diversity on corporate boards as well. About one in seven board seats on Fortune 500 companies are filled by minorities.

The issue has a chance to gain more of a foothold in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown because companies are more accountable to shareholders and stakeholders for demonstrating the kind of leadership that creates more sustainable business success.

And, with all that has happened, business as usual doesn’t move the trust needle higher.

Documenting the Case

Questions of fairness by themselves seem to get resolved at glacial pace. However, mounting documentation on the extent of the gender inequity has brought with it the attendant media attention that opens boardroom doors. The work of Nominating Committees has been moved into the public domain. Politicians, governments, investors, activist groups and others are saying things have to change.

An enormous body of research has accumulated: Often-cited studies have been undertaken by Catalyst, McKinsey, The Conference Board of Canada, The World Economic Forum Corporate Gender Gap Report, and Calvert Investments’ “Examining The Cracks in The Ceiling". to name a few.  Operating across the world where they have clients, executive search firms -- like Heidrick and Struggles, Korn/Ferry and Russell Reynolds -- and accounting firms -- like Ernst & Young and Deloitte -- are part of the information campaign writing articles, issuing or sponsoring studies, and hosting or sponsoring forums that address the value of increased corporate diversity.

Grass root activism to increase women’s presence on corporate boards and in C-suites continues to grow. Women’s organizations in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Maryland, for example, as well as strategic partnerships like the newly-created one between the mutual fund PAX World and ION add their efforts to those in Australia,  Europe and elsewhere.

Gender diversity has become a political issue. Prime Minister John Key remarked, “when you look at the small number of women in the boardrooms of New Zealand’s top businesses (one in 12) you have to wonder whether....our companies are making the best use of the talent on offer.”  Former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said last spring that it was “unacceptable that there were UK firms without any female board representation.”

Change is happening.  Britain, Belgium, Germany and Sweden are considering some kind of mandated percentage of women on corporate boards. They are following the lead of Norway’s 2003 law mandating at least 40% female representation which Norway has achieved. Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws and France is moving toward approval of its law.

Benefits of Diversity

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved a new rule that went into effect in spring 2010 requiring corporate boards to disclose how diversity is considered in the director nomination process.  SEC Commissioner Luis Aquilar, talking about the value of the new rule this month (November 2010), pointed to a study done by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System that found that companies with a high ratio of diverse board seats exceeded the average returns to the Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices over a five year period.

And for those who say they’d love to have a qualified woman or minority for a board seat but can’t find one, Agenda, a Financial Times publication, has tried to remove that barrier.

Agenda convened a panel of corporate governance experts, executive recruiters and diversity advocates, requesting they identify 100 carefully-vetted diversity candidates for board consideration. From a pool of nearly 300, 100 were ultimately selected. In the resulting “A Guide to Board Diversity,” the 100 candidates appear with picture and bio information relevant to their suitability for board consideration. Of the 100, there are 68 African American, Asian, Hispanic and Caucasian women and 32 African American, Asian and Hispanic men.

It is a start.

One of the most compelling reasons for diversity in the board room is the need for companies to benefit from the complexity of thought of their boards — not just leaders from different industries and skill expertise, but from qualified people with different ways of seeing the organization, with different paradigms and different points of view to process the same information and perhaps raise points that others might not have seen. That is the value of creating a diverse team – inevitably someone comes up with something that shifts the problem and collaboratively, a better solution can be found.

Board and committee chairmen might need to brush up on their facilitation skills to keep discussion on subject and moving toward resolution, but that is much easier to do than trying to compensate for thought capital not invited to the table.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

I was talking last week to three former corporate executives who sit on more than a half-dozen corporate boards among them about whether sustainability had come up as an agenda item at any of their board meetings. The answer was it hadn’t.

It is one of the ironies of a global movement that gets at the very essence of preserving life, business viability, and the future of the world, that sustainability is a chameleon moving between its micro and macro applications. One of its challenges is the ambiguity in its label. It isn’t surprising that when you ask people what their company is doing in sustainability, the question back is almost always “how are you defining it?”

In companies, sustainability is led at various levels of the organization – rarely at the board or CEO levels – though when the CEO is an active supporter, not surprisingly, programs flourish.

Although it is generally accepted that sustainability encompasses the spectrum of social, economic and environmental issues, companies generally focus on particular aspects most relevant to their business needs and stakeholders. For some the label means predominantly environmental; for others, it’s part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) program; and for a smaller number, there is a holistic approach where it is incorporated as a business strategy and involves the board and the culture.

Sustainability is about accountability. Not just to regulators and customers, but, as BP discovered last spring, to an ever-expanding definition of stakeholders  for whom business judgment errors can prove catastrophic.

Reputation vs. Strategy

No matter how a company defines sustainability, however, there appears widespread agreement - based on surveys last summer by McKinsey and the UN Global Compact led by Accenture, as well as last year’s research by the Boston Consulting Group -  that strengthening reputation and trust are prime motivators for companies to be involved with sustainability.

This isn’t the green light it may seem on the surface. Of course it is essential that companies place a value on investing in sustainability, but the reputation argument has a clear downside: it is hard to measure; without a crisis, complacency can be seductive; and unless a company is engaged in proactive risk management, reputation may not carry the day in competition with other seemingly more pressing business priorities. In addition, while support for sustainability ranked high in the surveys, a gap was evident between intentions and actions, which is a huge red flag. As important as reputation is, sustainability should be tied to business strategy, or at a minimum, be tied to many pieces of the business.

Avery Dennison is a good example. The company started its sustainability effort 10 years ago as a natural progression in the development and communication, both internally and externally, of its statement of corporate values and ethics, says Robert van Schoonenberg, former executive vice president, general counsel and secretary, who led the effort. “For sustainability to take hold and be real in a company what is done must make business sense in terms of the long-term needs of the business and creation of value for shareholders.” For it to work, he adds, “doing something good for the world, the community, or other stakeholders needs to be linked with other corporate objectives -- including cost reduction, quality, risk management, reputation, and being an employer who people want to work for or buy products from.”

It is hard to find a corporate website that doesn’t tout its efforts in sustainability and/or corporate responsibility – and also hard to tell by reading the hype from real impact.

“When it comes to companies addressing their real carbon footprint,” says S. Prakash Sethi, “most are good at cost-driven initiatives where there is a clear economic and public relations benefit to do it; for example to produce raw materials as efficiently as possible and improve operations minimizing impact to the environment.” Sethi is Distinguished University Professor of Management at Baruch College.

“However, companies generally aren’t addressing the negative externalities at the user end,” Sethi continues, “how a customer disposes of the product at the end of its useful life so it doesn’t end up in local community garbage dumps or shipped off to impoverished countries like Nigeria where workers salvage saleable raw materials at tremendous risk to their health and safety.”  Sethi is also president of Sethi International Center for Corporate Accountability.

Design for Living

Herman Miller designs its furnishings to meet the “cradle to cradle” (C2C) standard to which Sethi was referring — environmentally safe ways to dispose of products. Herman Miller’s goal by 2020 is for 100 percent of its products (old and new) to be able to be recycled or decomposed. Last year, after three years of work, its popular Aeron chair was made 94 percent recyclable.

Paul Murray, Herman Miller’s director of Environment Health & Safety, can also point to a significant track record in reducing carbon footprint in FY 2010 over the baseline year of 1994. He indicated that their overall footprint reduction is 90.68 percent; the result of averaging landfill reduction at 91.9 percent, water reduction at 82.1 percent, hazardous waste at 96.3 percent, air emissions at 83.2 percent, and renewable electrical energy at 100 percent.

In 2005 when CEO Brian Walker joined Herman Miller, his commitment to sustainability resulted in his choosing to embed two environmental goals (about how well Herman Miller protected the environment) into his own scorecard on which the board evaluated his performance from 2005 to 2010. One goal was the overall footprint reduction, described above, that was met. The second was the percentage of sales that were Design for the Environment (DfE)  approved. That goal was met in 2010 at 54 percent of sales, says Murray.

In FY 2011 – 2013, for Walker’s performance scorecard, the board will evaluate him on the two environmental goals with new targets and a third Walker added, which is the company’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2020.

Walker introduced the company to the concept of "creating a better world" in 2005.  Murray says it ties together CSR topics of environment, community, diversity and inclusiveness. One example of that, Murray says, is the house for Habitat for Humanity that employees and the company funded last summer and that employees built to be LEED certified energy-efficient.

Walker says sustainability/CSR is incorporated into Herman Miller’s business strategy. That seems to be right. It explains why engagement in environmental priorities continued in spite of the recession’s impact on the company’s sales and profits. Over 1,000 jobs were cut; employees received a 10 percent pay cut and a four-day work week beginning in spring 2009. Walker took a 20 percent pay cut. On June 1, 2010, the company experienced an increase in sales and returned to the 40-hour work week and restored most of the salaries.

In the tough choices Herman Miller faced last year, if sustainability were just about reputation, the program might have been endangered. Instead it was embedded, part of the business strategy, part of the company’s DNA, and it would seem, part of Herman Miller’s sense of its own sustainability.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

Last week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, saw a major upgrade in the quantification of corporate sustainability with the unveiling of what I'll call the "second generation" of the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World. When the Canadian corporate social responsibility magazine Corporate Knights teamed with the sustainable investing research firm Innovest to launch the list five years ago in Davos, the Global 100 turned heads by asserting the business relevance of sustainability while simultaneously meeting harsh criticism from the likes of sustainability guru Paul Hawken.

"My main point is that the criteria employed have little to do with sustainability as it is understood from a thermodynamic, biological point of view, that the term 'sustainable' is not defined by Corporate Knights or Innovest, and that the methodology is not transparent," Hawken told me. "The list does not advance sustainability because it cannot define, measure, or recognize it."

Now, the Global 100 methodology has finally gotten a major face-lift that addresses these critiques. Perhaps most importantly, the list included what the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) calls "sustainability context," which frames corporate progress in relation to a defined sustainability goal that needs to be met if our culture is to survive and thrive. The Global 100 chose resource efficiency improvements as its sustainability goal, using a "factor four" yardstick. A self-admittedly "crude" rule of thumb first proposed by Hunter and Amory Lovins in their 1998 book by that name, the notion holds that we need to improve resource productivity by 400 percent (or a factor of four) over the next two decades in order to get back within the earth's carrying capacity - an assertion subsequently supported by Lord Nicholas Stern and McKinsey. Using 2006 as a starting point, the Global 100 assesses whether companies are upping resource efficiency by six percent per year, the rate needed to reach factor four by 2026.

"While the majority of company-reported resource use data is unaudited, it is notable that 71 per cent of the 2010 Global 100 companies who report such information meet the test (six percent per annum resource productivity improvements) of being on a path toward sustainable resource use . . .," the Global 100 blog states.

Bill Baue

This is an important step in improving corporate sustainability ratings, but it falls short of taking a "thermodynamic, biological point of view." Measurements such as resource efficiency often express environmental impacts in financial terms, such as GDP per unit of emission - mixing apples and oranges. In contrast, true sustainability indicators compare apples to apples, measuring company-specific environmental impacts in terms of larger environmental limits, such as corporate emissions compared to global carbon capacity, assessing companies' proportional contribution toward meeting collective targets.

In this regard, the Global 100 represents a first step beyond first-generation sustainability metrics, which bordered on irrelevance, as they were untethered to a specific social or environmental goal that could objectively be defined as sustainable. Such first-wave sustainability claims may even be counter-productive, wooing us into thinking that corporate sustainability initiatives are making a difference, when in fact they may be lulling us into complacency with good intentions that have no chance of meeting social and environmental targets necessary for survival. Whether the Global 100 represents a true second generation effort, with "sustainability context" embedded at its core, is up in the air.

The other important step the Global 100 took this year involves transparency. Previously, the list relied on Innovest data, which is necessarily proprietary so the sustainable investing research firm could make a buck. The Global 100 took a two-step approach to free itself from the black box and "open the kimono." First, it selected the top ten percent of sustainable investment portfolios from the Global Sustainability Research Alliance (comprised of ten top sustainable investing research providers, such as Goldman Sachs GS SUSTAIN, EIRIS, and RiskMetrics, which use proprietary research) to constitute a beginning universe of some 3,000 companies. The Corporate Knights Research Group then applied its own set of 10 key performance indicators (such as carbon, energy, waste, and water productivity, as well as board diversity and CEO-to-worker pay disparity) to whittle down to the final list of 100.

While this innovative solution addresses the research methodology transparency conundrum, it doesn't necessarily solve the corporate transparency problem. To address this, the Global 100 added an equally weighted eleventh indicator, covering corporate disclosure. In a blog post aptly titled "Opaque Transparency," sustainability reporting expert Elaine Cohen noted the irony of zero overlap between the top 10 companies in the Global 100 and the top 10 in the Global 100 for transparency.

"For me, and perhaps I am a little extreme, or obsessive, or passionate, or stupid, transparency is an essential core element in sustainability which serves to leverage and drive performance in many different ways. Where there is low transparency, there is low trust, low dialogue, low openness to innovation, and low attention to stakeholder needs," Cohen said. "Whilst I do not expect such a ranking to be based on transparency alone, I believe that some degree of overlap would make this ranking more credible."

Cohen hit upon what I would call the "Oekom dilemma," so-named after the German sustainability research firm that came into criticism in the mid-2000s for downgrading company ratings for lack of disclosure, risking "inaccurate" assessment of companies with strong sustainability performance but weak transparency. Oekom's reasoning aligned with Cohen's: that sustainability without transparency is not truly sustainable. It will be interesting to see how the Global 100 handles this factor in the future.

Finally, the Global 100 added ranking this year. This seemingly superficial shift, moving away from an amorphous clump of a hundred sustainability leaders to a prioritized listing of best performers, may be the most satisfying change, fulfilling the human compulsion to create order out of chaos. It also sparks the competitive spirit, inspiring companies toward continuous improvement in sustainability performance as they vie for the top spot. Now that the list encourages companies to operate within at least some of the earth's thermodynamic limits, this competition may actually help us attain our salvation.

Bill Baue is Executive Director of Sea Change Media, and Executive Producer/Host of Sea Change Radio, a nationally syndicated show with a global podcast audience.  Disclosure: He has written for Corporate Knights.  This article was first published on CSRWire.