Great to see an old friend, Professor Rob Gray, joining forces with Professor Markus Milne to take a closer look at the triple bottom line agenda, 20 years after I first came up with the notion.
As I comment on The Conversation platform:
Many thanks to professors Rob Gray and Markus Milne for breathing some further oxygen into this debate. In reading the later stages of their assessment, however, I am reminded of the late Anita Roddick’s comments on the pessimism of the thought — and the optimism of the action. (When The Shop Australia did a triple bottom line report, they didn’t use three zebra hindquarters, but three men’s bums.)
For those new to this area of discussion, The Economist had this to say on the triple bottom line (TBL) a while back: http://www.economist.com/node/14301663
Twenty years on from the first launch of the idea, I have been working with Jochen Zeitz, who pioneered the Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L) approach while Chairman and CEO of PUMA. He and I have done a book on what we call ‘tomorrow’s bottom line,’ called ‘The Breakthrough Challenge: 10 Ways to Connect Today’s profits with Tomorrow’s Bottom Line’ – see http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118539699.html.
The spirit of the piece is that business can’s simply account and report itself out of the hole we have collectively dug for ourselves. Integrated reporting is only a small piece of the puzzle. Instead, what we call the ‘Global C-suite,’ the top teams of the world’s most powerful 1,000 companies, are going to have to embrace a ‘Stretch Agenda’ linking their strategies (whether couched as TBL, shared value or whatever) to the wider sustainability context.
This is the theme of a white paper we have just completed at Volans, with support from the Generation Foundation. Called ‘The Stretch Agenda: Targets & Incentives for the Breakthrough Decade,’ this is due for launch in March.
If you’re interested in receiving a copy let me know at john@volans.com.
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