TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE
LONDON 2025
I was in London to meet partners and investors.
It was good to be back.
I snuck into a session on the triple bottom line, the key speaker a Partner at one of the Big Four.
It went as expected — good teeth, slick slides, polished delivery.
I was jetlagged and wondered, despite the slick presentation, did this guy really have any skin in the game?
SKIN IN THE GAME
I wrote previously how, at some airport somewhere, I picked up a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin In The Game, the fifth book in his Incerto series (think Black Swan and Antifragile).
Taleb argues that, by being isolated from the real world impact of their ideas, academics lack skin in the game — leading to ideas that might harm when implemented at scale:
“Ideas need to have skin in the game. You know an idea will fail if it is not useful, and can be therefore vulnerable to the falsification of time.”
On social media, Taleb cut to the chase:
scar tissue
As so often, Steve Jobs got there first, this time putting consultants in the crosshairs.
In 1992, he spoke at MIT, arguing that project-focused consultants miss out on a key area of professional growth — learning from mistakes:
“I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where someone has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate some scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off — one learns a fraction of what one can.…”
THE FALSIFICATION OF TIME
So there I am in London, listening to a Big 4 consulting Partner charged out at maybe $3k an hour.
Within the first 5 minutes, he falsified his own schtick — and no-one seemed to notice.
He was talking about the wrong triple bottom line.
TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE 1.0
People. Planet. Profit.
The triple bottom line — or ‘TBL’ — concept was conceived by John Elkington in the 1990s.
Looking for the right words to explain the sustainability agenda’s expansion into business, ‘triple bottom line’ came to him like:
“Paul McCartney waking up with ‘Yesterday’ playing in his brain and initially believing that he was humming someone else’s tune…”
Essentially, the TBL’s a sustainability framework to examine a company’s social, environmental and economic (ESG) impact. ESG criteria are a set of standards used by responsible investors to screen companies:
Environmental criteria address carbon footprint, access to resources, pollution, and waste.
Social criteria address how an organization manages supply chain, product liability, talent, human rights and communities in which it operates.
Governance addresses an organization’s leadership, exec compensation and shareholder rights.
In effect, ESG metrics are a filter for investors to de-risk portfolios, drive sustainable growth and focus on the triple bottom line.
Twenty years after coming up with the TBL concept, however, Elkington realised the market had got it wrong — we’d been using the wrong triple bottom line.
TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE 2.0
People. Planet. Prosperity.
In June 2018, 25 years after coining the phrase, Elkington revisited the TBL concept in the Harvard Business Review. In a bold move, he proposed a “strategic recall to do some fine tuning” to his own idea.
Why?
Elkington believed the original TBL concept had been bent out of shape after being:
“Captured and diluted by accountants and reporting consultants.”
Elkington explained:
“The TBL wasn’t designed to be just an accounting tool. It was supposed to provoke deeper thinking about capitalism and its future, but many early adopters understood the concept as a balancing act, adopting a trade-off mentality.”
The TBL’s goal was:
“System change — pushing toward the transformation of capitalism. It was never supposed to be just an accounting system. It was originally intended as a genetic code, a triple helix of change for tomorrow’s capitalism, with a focus on breakthrough change, disruption, asymmetric growth (with unsustainable sectors actively sidelined), and the scaling of next-generation market solutions.”
In a nutshell, TBL 2.0 signified a deeper, more humane version of wealth and the way we live:
TBL 1.0: People. Planet. Profit.
TBL 2.0: People. Planet. Prosperity.
MISSION & mantra
Delivering on TBL 2.0 requires a new form of capitalism, new talent models and new leadership.
At Aithon, we go outside the wire, meet people, look them in the eye and listen. It’s not just about shareholders, management and partners, but about normal everyday people too.
We live Taleb’s thesis by immersing ourselves in the real world impact of our investments.
This is how you turn transactions into relationships and get real skin in the game. We have the scar tissue to prove it.
Ultimately, TBL 2.0 remains our mission and our mantra.
Dixon, CHAIRMAN