Why the Most Responsible Companies Often Operate in the Toughest Industries
People are the organization.
Drucker Institute’s Data Innovation Team
August 2026 Edition
By Daniel Martin, Chief Scientist, and Michael H. Kelly, Executive Director of The Drucker Institute
Conventional wisdom suggests that companies with the lightest environmental and social footprints should have the easiest path to responsible management. Software companies do not operate refineries. Banks do not run power plants. Digital businesses generally face fewer direct environmental challenges than utilities, manufacturers, and mining companies.
Our latest research suggests a more complicated reality.
When we analyzed the data we have on corporate responsibility across 758 of America’s largest public companies, the strongest overall performance came not from industries with the fewest stakeholder demands, but from industries facing some of the greatest scrutiny.
We examined six broad industry groups:
1. Production Inputs & Utilities
2. Health Care
3. Industrials
4. Technology & Communication
5. Consumer
6. Financial Services
The results raise a provocative possibility: The pressures that make an industry difficult to manage may also create stronger incentives to manage responsibly.
Our data cannot establish that scrutiny causes better management. But the pattern is striking enough to warrant attention. Industries facing significant oversight, operational risk, public accountability, and stakeholder expectations also tend to exhibit stronger and more consistent responsible-management systems.
The larger lesson is not that regulation automatically produces responsibility. It is that industry creates context, while management determines how organizations respond to it.
“The pressures that make an industry difficult to manage may also create stronger incentives to manage responsibly.”
A Different Way to Look at Corporate Responsibility
Corporate responsibility is often discussed through individual measures such as emissions, governance, workforce practices, diversity, or community engagement. Those measures matter. But executives face a broader question:
Can an organization consistently manage all of its responsibilities across the enterprise?
Our previous research found that responsibility behaves less like a collection of disconnected initiatives and more like an integrated management capability. Companies that perform well in one dimension frequently perform well across several others, suggesting that responsible management is systemic rather than accidental.
This time, we asked a different question: Where is that capability most deeply embedded?
Using corporate responsibility data from CSRHub, Sustainalytics, HIP Investor, and the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative, we compared responsible-management performance across the six industry groups.
The ranking was:
Industry Group / Average CSR Score
Production Inputs & Utilities / 55.28
Health Care / 53.82
Industrials / 51.42
Technology & Communication / 50.73
Consumer / 50.00
Financial Services / 48.18
The differences are meaningful, but they should not be mistaken for destiny. Industry creates the conditions in which a company operates. It does not determine how well an individual company will manage its responsibilities.
The companies themselves make that clear.
Average CSR Score
1. Production Inputs & Utilities:
Pressure Becomes Discipline
Our strongest overall results came from Production Inputs & Utilities, a group that includes Energy, Materials, Utilities, and Real Estate.
At first glance, that may seem surprising. These companies often face intense regulatory oversight, environmental scrutiny, public accountability, complex supply chains, large physical assets, and highly visible relationships with communities and governments.
Yet many of those same pressures coincide with stronger responsible-management systems.
Ecolab ranked second among all companies in our analysis, with a CSR score of 71.81. Newmont also ranked among the overall leaders, with a score of 69.06.
For companies like these, environmental performance, stakeholder relationships, operational risk, and public accountability cannot easily be separated from the core business. Responsibility cannot simply sit in a sustainability report. It has to become part of how the organization operates.
That may be the broader lesson from this group: When problems are large, visible, and consequential, organizations have powerful incentives to develop the discipline required to manage them.
2. Health Care:
Responsibility Depends on Trust
Health Care produced the second-highest average performance in our analysis.
Its responsibility profile differs from that of Energy or Utilities. Environmental exposure matters, but trust is central to the industry’s operating model.
Patients, physicians, employees, regulators, investors, and communities all depend on organizations capable of balancing innovation with ethics, transparency, safety, accountability, and long-term stewardship.
Several of the sector’s strongest performers illustrate this connection. Agilent Technologies ranked among the overall leaders with a score of 67.83. Merck, Medtronic, and Johnson & Johnson also ranked highly, all placing within the top 35 companies in the analysis.
In Health Care, trust cannot easily be separated from execution. An organization that loses trust can lose patients, employees, regulatory confidence, and ultimately its ability to fulfill its mission.
Responsibility therefore becomes more than a reputational concern. It becomes a management requirement.
3. Industrials:
Responsibility in the Operating System
Industrials ranked third among the six groups, with an average score of 51.42.
Like Production Inputs & Utilities, industrial companies operate in a world of physical assets, supply chains, workforce safety, environmental exposure, and operational risk. These responsibilities are difficult to separate from day-to-day execution.
That matters because responsible management is strongest when it becomes part of the operating system of an organization rather than a collection of initiatives sitting alongside it.
The performance of Industrials reinforces one of the central patterns in our data: industries with significant operational complexity can develop management systems that make responsibility repeatable.
The challenge is not eliminating complexity. It is learning to manage it.
4. Technology & Communication:
Two Very Different Stories
Perhaps the most revealing result came from Technology & Communication.
On average, the group ranked fourth. But that average conceals its most important characteristic: Technology had the greatest variation in responsible-management performance of any industry group in the study.
The contrast is dramatic.
HP Inc. ranked No. 1 among all companies in the analysis, with a score of 71.88. Cisco ranked No. 4 at 70.46, while Qualcomm ranked No. 7 at 69.68. Intel also performed strongly, with a score of 68.95.
At the other end of the distribution were companies such as Ubiquiti, CrowdStrike, MicroStrategy, and Palantir, all of which scored substantially below the sector’s leaders.
Technology, then, is not one story. It is two.
Some companies appear to be building sophisticated management systems capable of addressing a rapidly expanding set of responsibilities, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy, governance, workforce development, and stakeholder trust. Others have substantial ground to make up.
That dispersion may be more revealing than the sector average.
As technology creates new capabilities and new risks, responsible management may become an increasingly important source of competitive differentiation. The question is whether management systems can evolve quickly enough to govern those challenges while continuing to innovate.
5. Consumer:
Context Matters, but It Is Not Destiny
Consumer companies ranked fifth, with an average responsible-management score of 50.00.
That places the group near the middle of the overall distribution and reinforces an important caution about interpreting industry averages.
An industry can establish the context in which management operates, but it cannot determine the quality of management inside an individual organization.
Consumer companies face their own complex network of responsibilities involving customers, employees, suppliers, communities, brands, and increasingly visible supply chains. How individual companies respond to those expectations can vary considerably.
That variation matters because it reminds us not to turn industry averages into excuses.
The relevant question for an executive is not simply, “How does our industry perform?” It is, “How do we perform relative to organizations facing similar expectations?”
6. Financial Services:
What Kind of Accountability Matters?
Financial Services produced the lowest average responsible-management performance among the six groups, with a score of 48.18. It also ranked lowest on the environmental, external social, and governance dimensions included in our analysis.
But averages do not tell the whole story.
S&P Global ranked among the top 30 companies overall, with a score of 66.81. Moody’s ranked among the top 50, with a score of 64.41.
Strong responsible management is clearly possible in Financial Services. The more interesting question is why it appears less widespread across the sector.
That brings us back to oversight.
Financial Services operates under substantial regulation, but the nature of that regulation differs from the direct environmental and operational oversight faced by industries such as Utilities, Energy, and Materials.
The useful distinction, therefore, may not be between “regulated” and “unregulated” industries.
It may be between different forms of accountability and the management behaviors they encourage.
Does sustained external scrutiny help create incentives for companies to build responsibility more deeply into their operating systems? Or do the differences we observe reflect business models, organizational cultures, stakeholder expectations, or other factors?
Our analysis cannot answer those questions definitively. But the pattern is sufficiently strong to make them worth asking.
What the Data Says About Management
Across these six industries, one conclusion stands out:
Industry creates context, not destiny.
A company cannot choose every condition in which it operates. It cannot control all the expectations placed upon it by regulators, customers, employees, investors, communities, and other stakeholders.
It can decide how it responds.
The strongest organizations appear to distinguish themselves by building management systems that make responsible performance repeatable rather than dependent on isolated initiatives or individual leaders.
That suggests four questions for executive teams:
#1: Are we outperforming organizations that face the same stakeholder expectations?
Industry averages provide useful context. They should never become excuses.
#2: Have we built systems that reinforce responsible management, or are our strongest results isolated successes?
The real test of management is whether good performance can be repeated.
#3: When another company in our industry consistently outperforms us, what management practices explain the difference?
Benchmarking should reveal the capabilities behind superior performance, not simply the programs another company has adopted.
#4: Are we measuring responsibility as a reporting requirement, or managing it as a strategic capability?
That may be the most important question of all.
The Management Lesson
The conventional view is that companies become responsible when they choose to be responsible.
Our findings suggest something more complicated.
Organizations may become more responsible when the demands placed on management make responsibility impossible to treat as peripheral. The strongest-performing industries in our analysis are not necessarily the easiest places to operate. They are often industries where environmental exposure, public scrutiny, operational risk, stakeholder expectations, and regulatory accountability cannot be ignored.
Pressure does not guarantee responsible management. But it can make the need for good management impossible to avoid.
For executives, that distinction matters. The objective should not be to escape the responsibilities that come with operating an important institution. It should be to build an organization capable of meeting those responsibilities while performing at a high level.
That was central to Peter Drucker’s understanding of management. He did not see management merely as a business discipline. He saw effective and responsible institutions as essential to a functioning society.
That idea feels particularly relevant at a time when institutions face growing challenges of trust, performance, and purpose.
The toughest conditions do not excuse weak management. They may be where good management matters most.
Industry establishes the conditions. Management determines what an organization does with them.
“Peter Drucker did not see management merely as a business discipline. He saw effective and responsible institutions as essential to a functioning society.”
What’s next?
Next month Billy Xu, whose work draws on employee reviews to examine two distinct forms of engagement: engagement with one’s work and engagement with the organization, will explore how these signals relate differently to organizational health and performance, and why leaders should be cautious about reducing employee voice to a single metric.
"People are the organization."
That conviction sits at the center of the research agenda we are launching this year. Peter Drucker taught that productivity is not simply the responsibility of the worker. It is a function of how organizations manage, measure, and support the people who do the work.
At the Drucker Institute’s Data Innovation Team, we are translating that insight into rigorous, actionable research. Our central aim is to understand how employee signals move over time, what they reveal about organizational health, and how they relate to financial outcomes.
Over the coming year, we will publish a series of short monthly pieces that pull back the curtain on our projects. Our purpose is straightforward. We want to make the best social science methods useful for leaders and boards so they can make clearer, evidence-based decisions about people and performance.
Read this original essay for a snapshot of the research agenda guiding our first major wave of work.
The Drucker Institute’s Data Innovation Team
Who Is Doing the Work
This effort reflects a genuinely cross disciplinary team.
Becky Reichard leads the conceptual framework and literature integration.
Daniel Martin coordinates data engineering and model implementation.
Chasen Jeffries is developing the fatal flaw framing.
Xu Chen leads the topic modeling and validation pipelines.
Dana Bellinger is writing the employee engagement methodology.
Emily Alpay De Ruyter is leading the financial performance modeling.
Steven Zhou provides consultation on quantitative methods and psychometrics.
See the full team on the Drucker Institute website.
Together, this mix of scholars, data scientists, and practitioners forms the engine required to translate rigorous research into practical insight.
At the Drucker Institute, we believe that what gets measured shapes what gets managed. If people are the organization, then understanding employee signals with clarity and discipline is not a side project. It is central to the work of building effective, responsible, and enduring enterprises.
Inspired by Drucker’s wisdom?
Peter Drucker changed how the world thinks about management.
The Drucker Institute promotes effective management and responsible leadership as foundational elements that contribute to Drucker’s vision for a thriving, resilient, and functioning society.
The Drucker School of Management applies those ideas today through its graduate education, research, and community engagement. Learn more about how they carry forward his vision.
