Are ‘Best Managed’ Companies Also Conscious Businesses? Building an Exploratory Index from Reported Organizational Practices

Abstract

Despite the growing interest in purpose-driven business models, there is currently no operational, practice-based instrument that can be used to empirically assess corporate consciousness at the firm level based on the firm’s own reported practices rather than a self-report perceptual scale. This study addresses this gap by inductively developing the Conscious Business Index (CBi), an exploratory instrument built bottom-up from organizations’ reported practices using a sequential mixed-methods design. Drawing on data from 316 firms that participated in Deloitte’s Best Managed Companies (BMC) programme in Mexico (2023–2024), we conducted inductive thematic analysis (n = 243 open-ended responses), expert-panel evaluation (n = 7), and quantitative analysis (t-tests and k-means clustering). This was done to test whether BMC-awarded firms exhibit higher corporate consciousness than finalists. The results confirmed that the awarded firms scored significantly higher on the CBi than the finalists in both years (d=1.04 in 2023; d=1.14 in 2024), and this remained robust after controlling for cohort year, sector, firm size, and family business status (β=0.098, p<0.001). Furthermore, significant asymmetry emerged across the four pillars (Friedman p<0.001), with Higher Purpose solidifying over time as the lowest-scoring dimension. These results suggest that operational excellence does not consistently translate evenly into purpose-driven commitment. Current business-excellence frameworks capture the operational and cultural dimensions of conscious capitalism far more effectively than its philosophical core. This calls into question whether standard reporting requirements truly reflect genuine corporate consciousness.