CRO Magazine's 2007 "100 Best Corporate Citizens" List plus Your Company Profile plus the "100 Best" Logo for Your Unlimited Use as Reprints or Online

An interview with Pamela Passman, Vice President, Global Corporate Affairs, Microsoft.

Pamela Passman recalls her conversation with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington in the spring of 2002. Passman was new in her position as the software giant’s Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs. The discussion turned to Microsoft’s corporate citizenship initiatives around the world, with the theme being, “We’re doing an awful lot of different stuff.”

Ballmer wasn’t happy. “Steve said to me, ‘I feel like everything we do is pop guns!’” she recounts. “He was very dramatic. ‘Pop! Pop! Pop! It’s all nice, but... If we really focused our resources, we could do something very significant. Go figure it out, Pamela.’” That was quite a challenge...

Media pundits from The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and Socialfunds.com discuss current events in CRO. Hot topics of discussion: CEO Compensation Packages, Governance and the Role of Boards, Global Warming and the Healthcare Crisis, and When Corporations Step in for Government.

A salute to four companies, large and small, leading the way in corporate responsibility excellence. This year's winners: Starbucks Coffee Company for Corporate Responsibility Management; Patagonia Inc. for Environmental Sustainability; Berrett-Koehler Publishers for Stakeholder Accountability; Hypertherm Inc. for General Excellence.

Lewis Kaden, Vice Chair & Chief Administrative Officer of Citigroup discusses the role and responsibilities of boards and top management in corporate governance and corporate ethics. A transcript from the first annual CRO Conference.

"The subject of corporate responsibility in the broader sense is one that we at Citigroup, and I’m sure that all of you, think is extremely important, and it includes many aspects."

In a special session with corporate responsibility officers from Xerox, Schering-Plough and Citigroup, we hear real-life examples of how practioners deal with issues such as: The schism between the “ethics” function and the “compliance” function; making sure middle management sets the same tone as top management; unexpected allies and unavoidable resistance.

See the full list here.

A hopeful metamorphosis is under way in corporate America. Embracing goals beyond the traditional focus on earnings, the best companies are focusing on a host of social issues. They are, in short, serving not only stockholders, but other stakeholders as well. Any by stakeholders we mean those with a "stake" in the company: employees, customers, community members, and stockholders. As the performance of our 100 Best Corporate Citizens shows, serving this new community of stakeholders is just good business. One benefit, for example, is attracting and retaining employees. As Beth Sawi, chief administrative officer at Charles Schwab, puts it, employees come to Schwab "for something more than just the bottom line."

See the full list here.

Last year’s national election debacle has certainly left more than one U.S. citizen wondering what citizenship is worth. In an era of faltering government leadership it is fortunate that a growing number of U.S. corporations are taking their own sense of "citizenship" more seriously. Many companies are going to unusual lengths to address the needs and concerns of their various stakeholders, groups that have a stake in or are impacted by a company’s activities. The best among major public companies – as measured by service to seven stakeholder groups – have made this year’s list of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens.

See the full list here.

It’s one of the oldest questions in the field of business ethics: Does socially responsible behavior pay off on the bottom line? New research shows it does, based on last year’s list of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens. The overall financial performance of the 2001 list of the 100 Best firms was "significantly better" than the remaining companies in the S&P 500, according to recent analysis by Elizabeth A. Murphy and Curtis C. Verschoor, professors in the School of Accountancy and Management Information Sciences at De Paul University in Chicago. The difference was "strikingly large," Verschoor wrote in Strategic Finance magazine, January 2002. Using Business Week’s ranking of firms by financial performance (based on factors like sales growth, profit growth, and return on equity), the mean ranking of the 100 Best was "more than 10 percentile points higher" than other firms. The 100 Best Corporate Citizens also had a "significantly better reputation among corporate directors, security analysts, and senior executives, based on the 2001 Fortune magazine survey of "most admired companies,’" Verschoor wrote. "This may be the most concrete evidence now available that good citizenship really does pay off on the bottom line."