Esso Australia, the local arm of US-based Exxon Mobil, the biggest profit-maker in business history, has done neither, according to last week's damning findings by the Victorian Supreme Court over the fatal Longford gas plant explosion in 1998.

The fearful beating that Esso/Exxon Mobil's reputation has been suffering over Longford would raise legitimate questions about any company's management competency and corporate culture.

The most obvious is this: if a company can't or won't take adequate responsibility for the people closest to it, its workers, then what else is it putting at risk?

In Exxon Mobil's case, it says all its employees work to "rigorous worldwide safety and health standards", and that its safety record improved strongly in the 1990s. But at Longford, Justice Philip Cummins found Esso had shown a lamentable failure to accept responsibility for the deaths of two workers and injuries to eight others, ruling that the disaster was "grievous, tragic and avoidable".

Doubtless rigorous internal standards are important to the complex managerial task of good safety management, but so is a deep corporate responsibility from the highest echelons down for saving lives and averting human misery.

Investment analysts, board directors and others who should be asking hard questions to reassure themselves about management competency and corporate culture in companies can look to their safety approach as a key indicator.  Consumers also should ask the same questions. Put simply, if you had a choice, would you invest in or buy products and services from a company that kills and maims more people, or for that matter pollutes more than its competitors? Dolphin-safe is fine, but people-safe must count for something too!

Not surprisingly, leading socially responsible investment players like Westpac are asking these questions too, with our vast superannuation funds an obvious target for using a company's approach to health and safety as a key criterion for investment decisions. Super funds look after workers' money, so it's logical that they would favor investing in companies that look after workers and avoid those that don't.

The heady world of big business can often make focusing on workplace health and safety seem a bit dull. It's not sexy like the latest high-tech development, or the next corporate takeover, and can mean hard, grinding work for boards, managers and staff alike.

But there are positive role models, with transnational companies like DuPont and Alcoa gaining international recognition for their safety cultures. Aluminium giant Alcoa's chief for 13 years, Paul O'Neill, is one of America's more revered business figures and is now Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush administration. In March this year he was the keynote speaker at a national safety summit in Washington DC, convened to challenge America to face up to its hidden epidemic of workplace deaths, injuries and illnesses. O'Neill recalled that on his first day at Alcoa in 1987 he declared that the goal was "for no Alcoan to ever be hurt at work" and that he backed his rhetoric on safety with amazing personal commitment, even routinely giving ordinary workers his home telephone number to alert him to managers' safety failings. 

"For me, this is not about safety, per se; it's about leadership," he told the Washington summit. "And it's about a conviction I have that a truly great organisation requires that people be aligned around important values and they understand what they are. And no matter where you are in the world, they're the same."

As O'Neill clearly believes, it is leadership and alignment around values, rather than raw profits, that will distinguish the great companies of the 21st century. And it's the capacity to manage the hard, non-sexy business challenges like workplace safety that shows whether companies have the right stuff to make profits while also facing up to social responsibilities.