Benchmarking was invented by Xerox back in the 1950s. Together with its twin, reverse engineering, it was said to be the way forward in business. By breaking down one’s processes and comparing them with the competition, you would learn where the edge was and hopefully how to reach it.

Let’s face it, benchmarking has had its fair share of opponents through the decades. Some say it will teach you about the past but nothing about the future, which is where the action’s at. Some say benchmarking makes you a follower, not a leader.

They are missing the point. Benchmarking is a tool to get insight, and that’s what we do best at BoardClic. There really is no better way to figure out exactly where you stand. Rather than constricting you, good benchmarking shines a light on your operations and gives you ideas of where to move and how to do it. It’s taking a hard cold look at your business and how it is performing. You may not always like what you see. But it’s the way forward.

Collecting gold

In that spirit, BoardClic is launching two new indexes or “Scores” where companies will see and be able to compare themselves to benchmarks. And it’s no shoddy data. BoardClic has been collecting this gold since its own inception and long before that in the Lagercrantz group.

Just like our already established BoardClic Value Score, these two benchmark measures will draw on a web of responses to a number of questions in our evaluations and from our deep data lake.

The one I’d like to highlight today is our new BoardClic ESG score. We have always focused on ESG as a key driver for sustainable value creation at BoardClic, because good governance is what makes good companies amazing.

Too much info?

We haven’t made this particular benchmark data available to customers because originally it was considered too complex or maybe just too much info. I’m happy we’ve reversed that opinion now. The world needs this information and our customers are among the companies that can do the most impactful things with it. That’s even more true because as it turns out the initial benchmark in February 2021 for ESG in our universe of companies is 69/100. That’s not great, I can tell you and there really is no way to run a business without great ESG ambition.

Key areas that support this index include questions and topics such as sustainable value creation, stakeholder management, corporate health, diversity, culture and climate impact, to name but a few.

I will say that this is quite an achievement for the development team and I want to thank them all for the hard work they put into making this happen. I promise to get back to you soon about the second new score, the one for Strategy.