Running a business within a triple-bottom-line framework involves embracing complexity. It means acknowledging that the consequences of our actions (positive and negative) can never be completed accounted for or quantified within a balance sheet or income statement.
While earning a profit is a necessity, doing so as environmentally and socially responsibly as possible is a choice. Those who make this choice and take it seriously soon discover that there are rarely (never?) any easy or perfect solutions to the unique challenges they face. Rather than passing any dogmatic sustainability “purity test,” optimizing triple-bottom-line outcomes involves weighing trade-offs while being guided by one’s core values in an effort to have a net-positive impact.
This way of doing business doesn’t lend itself to the zero-sum, either/or ways of thinking that polarize and divide. As algorithms act as centrifugal forces that push people to extremes, sustainability values can serve as a balancing centripetal force that pulls us together as we do our best to navigate the ambiguities and complexities of a dynamic, ever-changing political economy with integrity and civility.
It’s in this spirit that Dr. Rebecca Lubot and I wrote an Op Ed that was published earlier today, and is also reflected in the Op Ed written by Frank Knapp, Jr. who serves as a board member for the American Sustainable Business Network (of which NJSBC is a state affiliate).
Creating a more just and sustainable economy involves both “walking the talk” within our own companies, while also constructively trying to influence larger systems in ways that incentivize and reward what Alex Tocqueville in 1835 called the pursuit of “self-interest rightly understood.”
I hope that both Op Eds below serve as timely food for thought and offer encouragement to those who still believe that a healthy economy and representative democracy can go hand-in-hand and are worth working towards creating together, for the benefit of all.
Read the newsletter with Op Eds here.
Richard Lawton
Executive Director
New Jersey Sustainable Business Council
rlawton@njsbcouncil.org