Ethisphere is the latest in a series of organizations founded and/or nurtured by Alex Brigham, a well respected voice in the ethics and compliance field. Alex has had a long history of incubating organizations that help advance the industry of business ethics through aiding in public education and developing of publicly-available best practices standards, benchmarks and frameworks that companies can openly and freely use to learn, compare and improve themselves. Beginning in 1998, Alex started Corpedia, an industry leading training and advisory services company assisting over 600 corporations to create, maintain and manage effective compliance programs. In addition to Ethisphere and Corpedia, Alex also founded the nonprofit Open Compliance & Ethics Group (www.oceg.org) and the nonprofit Center for Trade Integrity (www.tradeintegrity.org) and continues to partner with a number of organizations and NGOs to help elevate the importance of ethics and compliance in corporations, governments and non-profits.
Ethisphere originally began five years ago as an online industry e-newsletter published by corporate compliance and ethics training and consulting firm, Corpedia. The editorial bent of this newsletter (comprehensive global coverage of daily legal and ethics content, delivered with an edge) has made it into the most widely circulated and popular publication in the industry with over sixty thousand daily corporate, academic and governmental subscribers around the world.
The newsletter continues to be a free and valued public service and is supplemented by a quarterly print magazine publication that goes out to more than thirty thousand paid and qualified subscribers.
In the context of doing research both independently and with outside parties, the analytical operations of Ethisphere, the Ethisphere Institute, were born. As Ethisphere continued to grow in popularity, Corpedia decided to separate it out into its own separate, privately incorporated institute.
Ethisphere identified four primary areas of research to initially pursue (all of which are freely available to the public on Ethisphere’s website):
1. Researching, examining and publishing public best practices frameworks for corporate compliance and ethics operations and using these frameworks to score the overall compliance and ethical behavior of corporations. Ethisphere derives “Ethics Quotients” for each corporation (“EQ Score”) and annually Ethisphere publishes the top scoring companies by industry, with those companies that have demonstrably and statistically superior scores vs peers earning the annual “Ethisphere’s World’s Most Ethical Companies” designation for the year.
2. Examining codes of business conduct and objectively scoring them against best practices in code development, presentation, content and availability. To date, Ethisphere has scored the Codes of the entire Fortune 1000, and the Codes of many other global companies.
3. Researching, examining and publishing best practices in ethics, compliance and combating global corruption – specifically in supply chain management and the use of agents and representatives in global commerce. To this end, with the help of Corpedia and other institutions, Ethisphere played an instrumental role in establishing a nonprofit that works on the design and publishing of best practices in supply chain ethics and compliance. This nonprofit is called The Center for Trade Integrity (www.tradeintegrity.org) and is Chaired by the highly-respected William Lytton.
4. Researching how to do business effectively ‘ethically’ internationally on a country-by-country basis.
Ethisphere’s expenses are offset through membership dues of Ethisphere Council members (corporations, academic institutions and individuals which get unlimited access to Ethisphere’s webcasts and conferences) and through vendor sponsorships of the magazine and conferences/events.
