Review
Andrew Savitz recalls a conversation he had with a purchasing manager at a large telecommunications company. The man was adamant that social responsibility had nothing to do with his job, which was to buy products at the lowest price. “Would you buy from a foreign supplier that you knew was employing 10-year-old girls and paying them 60 cents a day for their labour?” Savitz asked. “Of course I wouldn’t do that,” came the reply. “Not even if the supplie…
Buy The Triple Bottom Line: How Today’s Best-Run Companies Are Achieving Economic, Social and Environmental Success — and How You Can Too at Amazon
The book is divided into two parts — a lecture on sustainability and then some general things to think about. The book’s first half was a lesson to which a reader would have likely already bought into. The second half promises to deliver on “how to make it happen,” but really is more general information than meaningful tools.
Given the author’s prior work at PricewaterhouseCoopers, it is understandable that the book reads like a macro-level consultant’s report. The book could have carried more weight with the inclusion of science and hard numbers of how to actually measure environmental and social value.
An alternative book for readers looking for more solid advice could be “Green to Gold.”
If you were traditionally trained a long time ago, you probably heard that the purpose of a corporation is to reward its shareholders with earnings, dividends and stock-price gains. Since then, the counterview has been growing that companies need to be responsible as well for the impact they create on users, customers, employees, suppliers, partners, distributors, lenders, the communities affected and the environment. That counterview is common sense in many dimensions today for a typical corporate manager or executive. If you harm people directly or indirectly, they will sue you, boycott your products, make life miserable, and help drive away profit.
The Triple Bottom Line attempts to go beyond that common sense view to establish the concept of a sustainable company, one that “creates profit for its shareholders while protecting the environment and improving the lives of those with whom it interacts.” As you can see, improving lives goes beyond the idea of “not harming lives” so it’s a proactive concept.
The authors use the example of the whaling industry running their stocks into virtual extinction as a poor way to create long-term profits and jobs. A more recent extended example is the ruckus created when the Hershey Trust decided to sell its controlling block of stock in Hershey Foods for a premium. The trust ultimately backed down due to pressure from all directions. The point: You just cannot optimize the solution for one set of stakeholders any more.
The book takes a long time to establish this premise. I assume that the authors have run into lots of skeptics in the past.
But if you accept the premise, it makes much of the book not terribly helpful.
The substance begins in chapter 13 on page 209 where the authors begin to address measuring and reporting. There’s a brief description of the work being done in environmental and social reporting, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). If you’re not familiar with GRI, you’ll get a little background. But you won’t know what to do next.
In the future, this kind of reporting will be more important. Stock exchanges in Scandinavia, France, Britain, South Africa and some other countries now require that listed companies report Triple Bottom Line results. It’s all part of an atmosphere of the public wanting more disclosure.
But if you want practical advice about what to do, you won’t find it here.
Think of this book as an appetizer to wake up your taste buds. The major issues involved in how to do this well are substantial and will take many years to work out. I suspect that taking the pathway of the Balanced Scorecard to work on these tasks is a surer route than Triple Bottom Line reporting.
I favor more measuring, reporting and focusing, but this book doesn’t provide enough meat to satisfy me. Find a meatier book if you can if this subject interests you.
This book is for interested general consumption rather than a technical practitioners’ text book and as such is more than successful in teaching the basics of the triple bottom line. I’m not quite sure why some of the Amazon reviewers seem so testy about this, as the majority of American business management (mid-baby boom and above) never encountered much if anything about corporate responsibility (or ethics) in the curricula they studied on their way up. To consider what that means for concepts like the triple bottom line, pretend that for 25 years today’s generation of senior managers had never been told to maximize shareholder value and now in 2007 were expected to internalize the concept and reflexively apply it to everything they do. Particularly from that point of view, Savitz’ book is a superb tool to help people become intelligently informed on basic issues of corporate responsibility and sustainability. What individuals do with that is up to that is up to them, but the writing’s good, the ideas are clear, the concepts are thought-provoking, and it’s the kind of book that drives one to want to learn more. The graphics are particularly useful and uncluttered.