You raise a few interesting questions. A longitudinal study would be interesting. Will companies at the bottom lose motivation? Alternatively, could companies in the top half, in the phenomenon Robert Cialdini refers to as the “magnetic middle”, gravitate toward the aveage? Knowing the companies that were at the top of the list, I am confident that won’t happen. Still, the only real way to understand the impact of the ratings themselves is to measure them over time, and to do so transparently.

Note that transparency, as with systems, is more of a relative term than absolute. On the one hand, these rankings were certainly more transparent than usual in explaining the components of the ranking. On the other hand, the transparency isn’t granular enough for me to directly trace my company’s actions and results to the component scores.

As Rupert points out, consistent metrics would make measuring a company’s contribution to its own and the planet’s sustainability would be a giant step forward. In the meantime, though, I’d really like to see specifically how the data from the listed companies were “normalized”.

And you’re dead on with regard to impact – that is, after all, the whole point!

Kathrin