‘A bumpy ride that’s far from over’ by Andrew Saunders, Management Today, December 2010

The ‘bumpy ride’ in the article’s title refers to the roller coaster environment that UK companies have been coping with over the last twelve months as they try to emerge from recession. As I reviewed the league table of admired companies looking for MTP clients, I saw that one company could claim to have been bumped more than any other; BP have dropped from 7th to 113th as a result of their problems in the Gulf.

Rankings of this kind are only valid if the methodology is rigorous and this survey seems at first sight to pass the test. The magazine works with Birmingham City Business School and the rankings are based on the votes of peer companies within each sector, combined with the views of City analysts. There were nine different criteria as follows:

- Quality of management
- Quality of goods and services
- Quality of marketing
- Ability to attract talent
- Value as an investment
- Community responsibility
- Financial Soundness
- Use of assets
- Capacity to innovate

It would have been good to know what the response rate was and who within the companies was making the ranking, but this information was not offered.

So the most admired company of all? This was MTP’s biggest and longest serving client, Unilever, rising from a position of 11th the previous year. It was a surprise to see Serco coming second as the service sectors in which they operate are not high profile and they are hardly a household name. Less surprising is Shell in third place. It is more useful to look for the big movers rather than the absolute positions and it was particularly interesting to see Barclays - regaining some of the banking sector’s lost reputation - and Ryanair moving to 32nd and 45th respectively, having been outside the top hundred last year. Surprising losers were Marks & Spencer, from 20th to 70th and GlaxoSmithKline from 5th to 37th.

Though it is great to see our biggest client as the most admired company, I found myself unconvinced of the purpose, despite the admirable attempts to arrive at a valid methodology. An examination of the separate criteria shows that it is possible to achieve a high position by being ‘OK’ in all nine areas without being number one in anything. Does this justify the title of being ‘the most admired company’? I was left wondering whether maybe this is just Management Today’s way of getting a few headlines and filling a few pages.

Click here to read the article in full;
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/features/1042694/britains-admired-companies-bumpy-ride-thats-far-over/