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 focus on building a sustainable business will outperform their peers that do not. Tom Fox welcomes her to this week’s show to talk about Ethisphere’s innovative new service called The Sphere. 

What is The Sphere?

Tom asks Erica to describe The Sphere and why she is 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 the compliance space, 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 gain access to a multitude of resources. 

Peer Data: A Powerful Tool

Tom asks Erica what makes peer data so important and powerful for a CCO. Whenever you're going to 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 just 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 in your leadership and vision more.

Resources

Erica Salmon Byrne | LinkedIn | Twitter

Ethisphere | The Sphere