The Triple Bottom Line

CSR and profits

No longer is the term ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ a novel idea amongst businesses. A 2011 sustainability study by MIT showed that sustainability, in the US at least, now plays a permanent part in 70% of corporate agendas.[read more]

No doubt the issue of sustainability is on the minds of executives. Countless studies confirm this. The now-infamous UN Global Compact Survey (2010) indicated 93% of global executives believed sustainability would have an impact or a profound impact on their operations.[read more]

small businesses

Big-box retail and sustainability might sound like mutually exclusive business endeavors, but some major players are going to great lengths to change that perception.[read more]

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When big multi-nationals commit to sustainability they do so recognizing the challenge as well as the massive opportunity to make a difference. The most successful companies commit fully to the strategy.[read more]

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An expert in public policy and sustainability reviews the City of Santa Monica's latest report on community life-work balance.[read more]

This is a good time to consider “impact investing,” and if you don’t know why, check the latest statement from your savings account or money market fund. My Vanguard money market fund is paying 0.04 percent interest; a Bank of America savings account pays 0.01 percent.You don’t need an MBA to understand that the financial return on those...[read more]

There is a lot of anecdotal information on what makes a value chain sustainable, but very little data. To change that, we partnered with ASQ, the Institute for Supply Management, and Deloitte, on a multi-year research study to identify proven management practices and cost-saving approaches, and the initial findings are out.[read more]

Emergence of social business tools which allow for organizations to create “sustainable business networks” create new, real-time opportunities to proactively manage objectives across the supply chain. The concept of sustainability across those value chains and social business networks as a means to communicate our own measures of sustainable performance is a fairly recent development over the past 2-3 years.[read more]

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For anyone to seriously accept the premise that 'sustainability' is a business strategy we must be able to define and quantify the business benefits that can be derived from adopting this model. These then become the criteria against which success can be measured, because just as with any other business strategy, return on investment will be the ultimate measure of success.[read more]

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A sustainability program, like any business initiative, is focused on the development of goals and objectives and tasks associated with achieving those goals and objectives. The nature of triple bottom-line (3BL) activities creates both structure and duplicity in terms of measuring the performance of many of these goals and tasks.[read more]

What makes a corporate responsibility (CR) program successful? Do an organization’s structure, staffing, budget impact success in achieving goals? What’s the effect of executive engagement in CR? These are just a few of the questions CR Magazine and NYSE-Euronext have sought to answer over the past couple of years of research into CR practices. Thanks to strong response from the CR community, we’ve learned a few things about the state of corporate citizenship.[read more]

The techniques and materials in delivering better buildings have been rapidly changing with the focus on optimising building efficiency. But the metrics for measuring paybacks have not evolved and this is creating a wrongful perception of the ‘cost premium’ of those buildings – whether it’s new build or refurbishment.[read more]