Britain’s Most Admired Companies - But What Do They Do?

I love a good business listing, survey or ranking - they so often provide a source of discussion, research or just a game of Business Family Fortunes which delegates at our AQA BUSS4 CPD courses might recognise!Management Today is a great source of this kind of thing and their annual survey of "Britain's Most Admired Companies" is particularly useful because it provides some great examples for students about businesses that are clearly doing something right (or which have very effective public relations departments).

The shortlist of Britain's Most Admired Companies 2012 has just been released and the winners will be announced in a suitably lavish, glitzy ceremony at the end of 2012.

However, I thought that the shortlist itself might be worthy of a lesson or research activity.

I was struck by the shortlist. There are names on there which I would hope most students (and their teachers) would recognise instantly. But, others might not be so familiar!

One approach might be to simply provide students with the shortlist and ask them to note down the main product/service offered by each (they may need to guess); or perhaps the economic sector each operates in.

Some are easy and students ought to be familiar with them: Alliance Boots, BSkyB, Carphone Warehouse, easyJet, JLP to name just a few

But what about Aggreko, Kerry Group, Pennon Group, Telecity Group. A little extra research might uncover some real gems...

Here is the list:

Aberdeen Asset Management

AdmiralAegis Group

Aggreko

Alliance Boots

Aveva Group

Balfour Beatty

BASF UK

Berkeley Group

BG Group

BSkyB

Carphone Warehouse

Centrica

Coca-Cola Enterprises

Derwent London

Diageo

Domino’s Pizza (UK)

easyJet

Experian Group

GlaxoSmithKline

Great Portland Estates

HSBC

IG Group

InterContinental Hotels

International Airlines Group

John Lewis Partnership

Johnson Matthey

Kerry Group

Kier Group

Kingfisher

McDonald’s Restaurants

Paddy Power

Pearson

Pennon Group

Persimmon

Petrofac

Pfizer UK

Rightmove

Rolls-Royce

Rotork

J Sainsbury

Specsavers

Spirax-Sarco Engineering

St James’s Place

Standard Chartered

Telecity Group

Ultra Electronics

Unilever

Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Media

Vodafone

William Hill