Competition is good. It keeps you on your toes; it forces you to do better. The Dallas Business Journal might be thinking about this today, after yesterday’s Dallas Morning News debuted a new annual magazine called Top 100 Places To Work 2009. The inaugural, 44-page DMN product ranked local companies based on six criteria; The Richards Group came in No. 1. The DBJ may be feeling the heat because, for eight years, it’s had the “best workplace” field to itself here with an annual publication called Best Places To Work In The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
The scoring for both publications is handled by an outside firm: Kansas-based Quantum Market Research for the DBJ; Pennsylvania-based Workplace Dynamics LLC for the DMN. One interesting difference is that The News invites a select group of companies to participate while, under the DBJ rules, companies nominate themselves. And curiously, the DMN‘s No. 2-ranked company–Southwest Airlines–hasn’t shown up on the DBJ rankings for years. But, one thing’s for sure. The opportunities for company bragging rights–“We’re the best;” “No, we are!”–just doubled around here.
UPDATE: I misunderstood her meaning when Cheryl Hall explained in the Sunday magazine: “The News and Workplace Dynamics invited more than 1,100 companies to participate in our inaugural Top 100. We at the newspaper don’t know which businesses entered.” The DMN says that any and all companies here were eligible to be nominated and to participate.
