Erica Salmon Byrne is the President of Ethisphere and Chair of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance. Ethisphere is a company that believes that companies that are focused on building a sustainable business will outperform their peers that do not. I welcome her to this week’s show to talk about Ethisphere’s innovative new service, The Sphere.

What is The See more +

Erica Salmon Byrne is the President of Ethisphere and Chair of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance. Ethisphere is a company that believes that companies that are focused on building a sustainable business will outperform their peers that do not. I welcome her to this week’s show to talk about Ethisphere’s innovative new service, The Sphere.

What is The Sphere?

I asked Erica to describe The Sphere and why she was so excited about the launch. For more than 15 years, Ethisphere has been collecting data on the programmatic practices of the world’s most ethical companies through their questionnaire, called the Ethics Quotient, Erica explains. They realized a demand for solid benchmarking within compliance and decided to democratize their data access. This was the birth of The Sphere – a subscription-based service that allows you to select the topic you are interested in getting data on and access many resources.

Peer Data: A Powerful Tool

I ask Erica what makes peer data important and powerful for a CCO. Whenever you make a business proposition, she replies, the first question you will be asked is ‘What are other people doing?’. Businesses want to compare their practices and progress to their peers’. This is to avoid being dubbed “a weak antelope” – you don’t necessarily want to be ahead of the pack; you want to ensure that you have a functioning practice compared to your competitors. So how to determine you’re in that comfortable middle position of the pack? The answer is data analysis. When you present the relevant data to your CFO or compliance team, they tend to believe more in your leadership and vision. See less –