Corporate Accountability
We’re living through a modern business version of Dickens’ best of times, worst of times maxim. On the credit side of the ledger, endless data points and innovative collaborations offer ways to unlock insights. On the debit side, despite a booming economy there’s an inherent suspicion of big business and its motivations.
For three years we’ve been trying to harness the former to cure the latter. The Just 100 represents a novel attempt to bring transparency to corporate America and encourage practices that forge a sustainable form of capitalism, the greatest system for creating prosperity that the world has ever known. The key partner here: Just Capital, a nonprofit research firm started by hedge fund heavyweight Paul Tudor Jones (full disclosure: I’m a board member at Just Capital).
Just Capital is one of the best and most diligent machines I’ve ever encountered. Over the past four years, it has surveyed more than 81,000 Americans about what priorities they seek in corporate behavior. Just
Capital’s team of 22 crack data nerds (20 are pictured above, along with Forbes’ Maggie McGrath) then tracks and measures how public companies, drawn from the Russell 1000, comport with what Americans expect, using over 110,000 data points across 76 unique metrics.
“There is nothing more American than the freedom to choose,” says Martin Whittaker, Just Capital’s CEO. “Such freedoms require individual empowerment—including at the point of sale.”
Inside all that data lies wisdom. That’s what Forbes staff writer Maggie McGrath, the lead writer of this issue’s cover story, found in hints and trends, backed by anecdotes and experts, that pointed to an entirely new phase of American corporate leadership marked by the desire to move past what government is now requiring (or not) in pursuit of a larger public interest.
“A lot of the executives and investors I spoke with didn’t see themselves as engaging in self-regulation,” says McGrath. “They instead see their 22 weeks of paid family leave or internal carbon taxes as business imperatives.” It’s a very important story—starting on page 54—that harks all the way back to Adam Smith.