TriplePundit • 20 Years Older, Any Wiser?

Entrepreneur John Elkington introduced the triple bottom line as a way to quantify how businesses affect the world around them, beyond how much money they make. At the time, it was downright revolutionary — creating the basis for modern sustainability reporting and related frameworks like corporate social responsibility, shared value and social return on investment. It’s also part of what inspired MBA candidates at the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, the first accredited business master’s program with a focus on sustainability, to launch TriplePundit.

But when it comes to actually changing people’s lives and safeguarding the future of our environment, did the three Ps ever actually make a difference?

We’re far from the first to ask the question. Elkington himself recalled the triple bottom line — not because he no longer saw value in it, but because it had been “captured and diluted by accountants and reporting consultants,” he wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2018. “Whereas CEOs, CFOs, and other corporate leaders move heaven and earth to ensure that they hit their profit targets, the same is very rarely true of their people and planet targets. Clearly, the Triple Bottom Line has failed to bury the single bottom line paradigm.”

The following year, the Business Roundtable, which represents the largest U.S. companies, presented its own alternative — revising what’s known as the “purpose of a corporation” to include not just a company’s responsibility to create a profit for shareholders, but also its duty to all stakeholders, including employees, customers and communities. Some experts say this shift created a quiet but growing sea change in how markets move and decisions are made, whether the wealthy elite or politicians want it or not.

But for many, it doesn’t really feel that way. Public trust in business is slipping. Almost two-thirds of global sustainability professionals now say they feel burned out in their work, and most report “significant backlash” against sustainability objectives in their home countries.

Money continues to flow into sustainable funds, and companies say they’re still committed to their sustainability agendas, but they’re also financing billions of dollars in fossil fuel projects and pledging millions to help Donald Trump build a ballroom, in an apparent bid to curry favor with a politician who demonizes these ideas. Wealth disparity is worse than ever, people are struggling to get by, and the impacts of climate change are already destroying entire communities.

All things considered, it’s hard not to ask if concepts like the triple bottom line or shared value or stakeholder capitalism even help, or if they just provide cover for business leaders to delay action while jetting off to another self-congratulatory working group in a far-off resort city.

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, and I often find myself thinking: Maybe it doesn’t matter, or at least not as much as we think it does.

Maybe sustainability advocates haven’t convinced all, or even most, executives to think differently about the challenges we face or the way business could (or should) show up in the world. But if we take that as a cue to stand stronger for what we see as worthwhile and important, there could soon come a day when we don’t need them anymore.

As civil rights visionary and author James Baldwin wrote in his 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son: “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”

Take, for example, the lowly shipping container. It seems a simple thing, a box made of metal, but it quite literally changed the world — replacing the dangerous, labor-intensive, and costly process of loading and unloading cargo from factories into trains and onto shipping barges for global transport. The advent of a container that could be lifted from trucks onto ships without unloading — developed by U.S. trucking entrepreneur Malcolm McLean in the 1950s — was recognized as a game-changer almost immediately, and within 20 years, shipping containers became the new normal.

Even if no one saw the vision before, if workers losing limbs loading and unloading trucks in a wildly inefficient ritual seemed just fine to them, all it took was one person to see things differently. For better or worse, shipping containers shaped life as we know it, and now we couldn’t imagine things any other way.

Could sustainability innovators do the same today by, slowly but surely, showing that another way could make life better?

Some could argue we already do this, with corporate incubators for sustainability startups and government initiatives like the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office that helped companies like Tesla, Rivian and Monolith scale.

But it doesn’t happen nearly enough, and those who stare down our biggest problems every day of their lives are too often overlooked and squeezed out of the conversation.

Just over the past few weeks, we’ve reported on technology that makes drinks fizzy with carbon sucked from the air, a wave-powered buoy that can clean enough drinking water for 1,500 people a day, and simple walls made of sand and stone that can bring drought-stricken communities back from the brink of starvation. Why wouldn’t we do these things, or at least give them a fair chance?

Nick Aster founded TriplePundit in 2005 to tell more people about the emerging concepts he was studying and recruited a few classmates to contribute. They described themselves as “critical optimists,” aiming to grow the site into a trusted resource and community for the budding corporate sustainability field. Since then, 3p has reported on some of the most significant events in our space — from the rise of Black Lives Matter movement and the adoption of the Paris climate agreement, to the corporate response to the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve changed, too, shifting from a digest of quick news for busy professionals to in-depth solutions journalism that brings audiences a fresh perspective in this critical decade of action.

Having joined a few years shy of TriplePundit’s first decade, our 20th year as a newsroom is a milestone that means a lot to me, but the nature of the time we’re in — and the questions it inevitably brings forward about the measurable outcome of corporate sustainability — puts the occasion in a different perspective.

In some areas, we’ve come a long way. In others, not so much. Our shortcomings are well reported — missing the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, faltering progress on the Sustainable Development Goals and other global anti-poverty campaigns. But we also have decades of data and lessons learned from countless people and organizations who’ve been successful at pushing progress forward in their own small ways. Their example shows what’s possible when we put time, energy and money into solving a problem, and stick with it for the long haul.

But too often we fail to do that. We give up too fast, we lose interest, political winds and will shift away. And now, as countries around the world slip into violent authoritarianism and climate catastrophes claim lives and livelihoods, the stories of those who kept trying are often drowned out even further.

Albert Einstein is widely credited as saying, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with the problems longer.”

As TriplePundit passes this milestone, we’re taking a look back at how the sustainability space has grown and changed over the past 20 years — with an eye toward the problems we stayed with, what we learned, and why on earth we can’t do it more often. We’ll trace what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong in the past, and ask leaders, experts and advocates about their hopes for the future.

It’s part of our commitment to solutions journalism, and to telling the under-told stories of people starting small but with the potential to change everything. As the late conservationist Jane Goodall once said: “Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.”

We might be a little closer to salvation if the powerful majority had stayed with the world’s biggest problems a bit longer, or given space for audacious ideas that were different from the norm, but let’s not make the same mistake with the next 20 years. We’d love for you to join us in reflecting on where we’ve come and laying down a mandate for where we go next. Please get in touch with topics or ideas you’d like to see us cover at [email protected]. If we let them, the tenacious dreamers of the world might just save us all.

Featured images: Mladen Mavrak/Unsplash; Wikimedia Commons