Triple Bottom Line
Triple Bottom Line judges a business on three accounts at once - profit, people, and planet - so a result that looks good on one can't quietly hide damage on the other two.
Three circles overlap in the middle, profit, people and planet, none of them able to sit apart from the others.
Reach for this when…
- Investors or customers are asking about your social and environmental impact, not just returns.
- A decision looks financially sound but you suspect it's quietly costing you socially or environmentally.
- You want one framework that forces trade-offs into the open instead of optimising blind for profit.
How to run it
- Set out what 'success' means on each of the three accounts: profit, people, planet.
- Measure current performance on all three, even where the data is rougher than your financials.
- Look for decisions that trade one account against another and name the trade-off explicitly.
- Report on all three together so nobody can quietly optimise for one and hide the cost on the others.
- Revisit the measures as the business changes - what mattered at launch may not matter at scale.
A worked example
Situation. Abdul Karim ran Kakao Emas, a cocoa co-operative in Palu, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, that had grown profit steadily by pushing farmers toward a higher-yield variety that stripped the soil faster.
Applied. Running the Triple Bottom Line, he set out measures for the other two accounts alongside profit - farmer income stability and soil health across member farms. The soil measure exposed the real cost of the yield push.
Result. He phased in a rotation requirement tied to the co-operative's buying price. Profit growth slowed for two seasons, but farmer retention and soil quality both turned around, protecting a business the profit figure alone was quietly eating into.
The catch
The 'people' and 'planet' accounts are far harder to measure consistently than profit, which makes it easy for the framework to become a reporting exercise rather than a decision tool. Nothing in it says how to weigh a trade-off between the three - that judgement still has to be made by someone.
If the social and environmental figures never once change a decision, they're a report, not a bottom line.
Origin: John Elkington