Cannibals With Forks - The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.
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by John Elkington
The Polish poet Stanislaw Lec asked "Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?"
Business consultant John Elkington believes that it can be. "In our rapidly evolving capitalist economies, where it is in the natural order of things for corporations to devour competing corporations, for industries to carve up and digest other industries, one emerging form of capitalism with a fork - sustainable capitalism - would certainly constitute real progress."
The three prongs of the fork, sustainability's triple bottom line, are:
- economic prosperity (focusing on social capital, eco-efficiency, externalities),
- environmental quality (focusing on human capital, environmental accounting, ISO 140001 standards), and
- social justice (focusing on social capital, social audits).
As we move into the third millennium, we are embarking on a global cultural revolution, with business in the driving seat. The seven dimensions of a sustainable future (the 7-D world) are also revolutions:
- Markets: business will operate in fluid markets that are more open to competition that ever;
- Values: a worldwide shift in human and societal values is underway, notably from "hard" commercial values to "softer" triple bottom line values, and swimming against the tide can be difficult (companies misreading the direction of flow risk being swept aside);
- Transparency: growing international transparency will accelerate, and business will find its thinking, priorities, and activities under increasingly intense scrutiny;
- Life Cycle technology: a shift from thinking about the acceptability of products at their point of sale to their cradle to grave performance;
- Partnerships: companies are increasingly seeking new alliances congruent with the new alignment of triple bottom line forces;
- Time: current time is becoming "wider" (with more and more happening every minute of the day) and "longer" (pushed by the sustainability agenda);
- Corporate Governance: new questions are being asked about what the business is for and who should have a say in how companies are run; the better the system of corporate governance, the greater the chance we can build toward genuinely sustainable capitalism.
The process of greening our minds and industries may have been under way for 40 years, but putting the world economy on a more sustainable footing has only just begun.
- Reviewed by SustainAbility, UK (forwarded by pioneer Alex Cutler)
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