What Is The Triple Bottom Line Approach To Business And How Do You Measure Success Using It?

TBL is a different way of doing corporate accounting. Not just about monetary profit, but including extra priorities when measuring success, specifically impacts on society and the environment.

In practical terms, it means coming up with ways of measuring social and environmental performance, not just profitability. Sometimes TBL is rephrased "People, Planet, Profit"; TBL has been endorsed by a local government association (international) sponsored by the United Nations.

Not everyone agrees that TBL is a reasonable and admirable objective: read example criticism.

As for how one measures success using TBL, it gets complicated. The company basically needs to come up with accounting sheets, only also for environment and social capital rather as well as the usual money capital. And then summarise how the balance is going in each column (economic, social, environmental).

Which brings the questions, what types of social and environmental capital to include in the balance sheet, and how to weigh up different types of damage or benefits against each other? It's too complicated to explain here, but there are many relevant books about TBL on Amazon.

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