Cannibals with Forks

Elkington, a sustainability consultant, introduced the phrase triple bottom line in this book, proposing that companies should measure and report performance against economic, environmental and social criteria rather than financial results alone.

His argument is that environmental and social factors are becoming material to business outcomes rather than remaining external to them, driven by regulation, by customer and employee expectations, by litigation risk, by investor pressure and by resource constraints. He argues that firms which measure only financial results will therefore mismanage risks and opportunities that eventually appear in the financial results anyway.

The framework identifies what he calls seven sustainability revolutions covering markets, values, transparency, life-cycle technology, partnerships, time horizons and corporate governance, and he examines how each changes what companies must do.

The practical content covers life-cycle assessment, meaning the measurement of environmental effects across a product's whole existence from raw material to disposal; environmental accounting and the difficulty of assigning monetary values to non-market effects; stakeholder engagement; and the reporting practices then emerging.

Elkington later published a public reconsideration of the triple bottom line, arguing that it had been adopted as an accounting and reporting exercise rather than as the change in business purpose he intended, and that its widespread adoption had produced measurement without transformation. That reconsideration is more useful than the original book for anyone assessing current sustainability reporting.

The book is consultancy-derived and its cases are from the 1990s. The prediction that these factors would become material has been substantially borne out through regulation, disclosure requirements and investor pressure. The concept's practical implementation has drawn the criticism its originator eventually made himself.