Today, Trust Across America™ (TAA) (www.trustacrossamerica.com) announced the results of their audit of almost 3000 public companies and named Hess (www.hess.com ) as the Most Trustworthy Public Company for 2010. Barbara Kimmel, Co-founder of Trust Across America states that “While no company received a perfect score, Hess came out on top.”
The audit incorporates over 500 data points with respect to five key corporate indicators of trustworthy business behavior: Financial stability and strength, Accounting conservativeness, Corporate integrity, Transparency, and Sustainability, aptly called FACTS™.
The model was developed in collaboration with two Harvard MBA’s and a leading PhD quantitative analyst. The audit process, which took almost two years to complete, is “the most holistic and comprehensive trust “health” checkup for public companies,” according to its founders.
A statement on the Hess website indicates that the company has “six core values that represent its collective conscience and embed them in their organization: Integrity, People, Performance, Value Creation, Social Responsibility and Independent Spirit. Their business is “built on long standing relationships founded on trust.”
The companies that ranked among the “Top Ten” embed trustworthy business behavior in their corporate culture. They are listed below in alphabetical order.
Albemarle www.albemarle.com
Best Buy www.bby.com
Cummins www.cummins.com
Eastman Chemical www.eastman.com
Hess www.hess.com
Lexmark www.lexmark.com
Lubrizol www.lubrizol.com
Sonoco Products www.sonoco.com
Texas Instruments www.ti.com
USANA www.usana.com
Trust Across America™ (TAA) is a program of Next Decade, Inc., an award-winning firm that has been unraveling and simplifying complex subjects for over 20 years. TAA provides a framework for public companies to improve trustworthy business practices, as well as media opportunities to highlight companies that are exhibiting high levels of trust and integrity.
Contact: For more information contact Barbara Kimmel, Executive Director, Trust Across America barbara@trustacrossamerica.com or simply hit reply.
Congratulations to Hess and all of the Top Trustworthy Companies! Thanks for companies like these that model the way, and for organizations like TAA that celebrate them.
Congratulations to the Trustworthy Top 100; it is a notable achievement.
Barbara, I think what Trust Across America has done here is noteworthy.
There are a lot of trust studies out there on the trustworthiness of companies and sectors. But they are almost all subjective–surveys, which measure the trusting-ness of the respondents in a way that can’t be teased apart from the trustworthiness of the subjects, and which are inevitably influenced by the latest scandals and news stories.
Then there are trust studies that look at objective behaviors and data–but they tend to be functionally narrow, e.g. accounting behavior, or CSR-related. Relevant, but not the whole picture of trust either.
What you have done is unique. You have taken a broad-based definition of trust (appropriate, because trust is a very broad theme), and identified objective behaviors with metrics to support them. The result is an objective, data-based broad definition of the trustworthiness of individual corporations.
If anyone wonders how you came up with a particular score for a particular company, you are able to say, “Here is exactly how we came up with that score.” And the dialogue that follows will perhaps do even more to help people explore trust than the ranking itself.
Congrats and thanks to you.