Spring GDS 25th Anniversary
A logistics company that ships to 190 countries built something to ship to itself.
Triple bottom line
What is the triple bottom line?
The triple bottom line is an accounting framework that judges a company on three measures instead of one: people, planet, and profit. The term was coined by John Elkington in 1994 as a way to argue that financial performance alone is an incomplete picture of whether a business is actually succeeding. Social and environmental results belong on the ledger too.
The framework asks a company to track its social impact and its environmental footprint with the same seriousness it brings to revenue. A firm posting record profits while degrading the communities it operates in or burning through natural resources is failing on two of the three. The hard part is measurement. Profit has agreed units. Social and environmental outcomes need defined metrics, honest data, and a willingness to report numbers that may not flatter you. A retailer reporting its carbon emissions and supplier wages alongside its quarterly earnings is the idea in practice.
Worth knowing: Elkington himself later said the concept had been watered down into a box-ticking exercise and proposed a "recall" of it in 2018. The framework still holds value, but only when the people and planet lines carry real weight rather than serving as decoration around the profit number.
The triple bottom line at Dallonses
As a certified B Corp, Dallonses treats the triple bottom line as part of how we run, not a slide in a pitch deck. Profit keeps the company alive and lets us pay people properly. The other two lines decide what we are willing to do to earn it. We turn down work that conflicts with them, and we measure our footprint rather than guessing at it.
For clients, the framework shows up most clearly in our sustainable tech consulting. We help teams put numbers against the social and environmental cost of the systems they run, the same way they already track spend. Measurement is where good intentions either become real or quietly fall apart, so that is where we start.
Want technology decisions measured on more than cost? Let's look at all three lines.
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