Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of the 21st Century Business (Conscientious Commerce) [Paperback]

Elkington convincingly argues that future market success will often depend upon a company's ability to satisfy the three-pronged fork of profitability, environmental quality, and social justice. This lively and practical guide outlines the seven great "sustainable" revolutions that are already unfolding, showing how business leaders should respond and profiles some of the world's best-known companies including Nike, Wal-mart, Levi Strauss, Volkswagen, Texaco, Intel, Volvo, Dow Chemical, Electrolux, Novo Nordisk, and Shell.

Cannibals with Forks passionately demonstrates how all businesses can and must help society achieve the three interlinked goals of economic prosperity, environmental protection and social equity, issues which are already at the top of the corporate agenda. Global in scope, it describes seven linked revolutions which will define the business environment of the first few decades of the 21st century.

"The Triple Bottom Line is becoming an imperative. Environmental and social responsibility should beat at the heart of every business leader." ANITA RODDICK Founder and CEO of the Body Shop

"Ignoring any part of John Elkington's triple bottom line invites disaster." FINANCIAL TIMES

"Cannibals with Forks is honest, practical, compassionate and deeply informed; a brilliant synthesis, cutting through the thicket of tough issues and producing elegant solutions that can be applied today." PAUL HAWKEN Author, The Ecology of Commerce

John Elkington is Chairman of strategy consultants, SustainAbility, and the author of global bestsellers The Green Consumer Guide and The Green Capitalists. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

John Elkington is co-author of the million-copy bestseller The Green Consumer Guide, Chairman of London-based SustainAbility, Europe's best respected sustainability consultancy firm, and a regular Guardian columnist and contributor to Harvard Business Review, Management Today, and Tomorrow Magazine.

Foreword

"Is it progress," the Polish poet Stanislaw Lee asked, "if a cannibal uses a fork?" I believe it can be, particularly in the case of corporate capitalism and corporate cannibalism. If this last phrase seems far-fetched, read this description of Microsoft founder, William Gates III, "Bill Gates eats competitors with the methodical determination of a corporate Pacman." Gates, it is true, is scarcely renowned for his environmental or social sensitivities. But in our rapidly evolving capitalist economics, where it is in the natural order of things for corporations to devour competing corporations, for industries to carve up and digest other industries, one emerging form of "cannibalism with a fork" - sustainable capitalism - would certainly constitute real progress.

The fork, sustainability's triple bottom line, is explained in Chapter 4. Its three prongs are economic prosperity, environmental quality, and social justice. Cannibals With Forks identifies seven revolutions which are already beginning to transform the world of business and will help drive major corporations and leading economies towards these goals. The book, for reasons which will become apparent, is skewed more to the environmental dimension of sustainability than to the social or economic dimensions, but the integration of these different dimensions of the emerging political agenda will be a central challenge for 21st century business. And we will need to maintain our focus and drive to sustain this agenda through the inevitable cycles of economic growth and recession, company mergers and demergers, public enthusiasm and disillusion, government activism and passivity.

Inevitably, a key part of the task will be effective stakeholder consultation. Larry Ellison, founder of the US software giant Oracle, showed the way when he took the unusual step of setting up a cyberspace polling booth on the Internet to canvas opinion on whether he should bid for troubled Apple Computer. Apple may be a special case, but many of the companies discussed in the following pages have to consult a much wider range of stakeholders than would have been usual even a few years ago. Moreover, some are trying to work out ways of doing so on a continuing basis, not simply when in the throes of takeovers, mergers, or - as the recent history of companies like ICI, Hoechst, and Monsanto suggests will increasingly be the trend - demergers.

In the following pages, I draw on first-hand experience over more than two decades with some of the world's best-known corporations, national and international government agencies, and non-governmental organizations, as they struggle to embrace key elements of the sustainability agenda and to internalize a growing range of economic, environmental, and social costs. Most of these companies have acted because they have had previous, painful experience of what can happen when they, or other companies, misread or fail to act upon a major new economic, social or political agenda. But growing numbers have also responded because they scented commercial opportunity.

Many of the case studies are drawn from companies with which SustainAbility has worked over the years, because these are the organizations I know best. Throughout, I will name companies we have worked with, explaining some of the things that have gone right for them and some of the things that have gone wrong. Alert readers will note that the geopolitical focus of the book is largely on Western Europe and North America, where many of the relevant trends first surfaced. But our ability to deliver longer term sustainability will also depend heavily on our ability to help switch on the capitalists, financial markets, entrepreneurs, managerial classes, and consumers of the emerging economies, developing nations, and less developed countries of the world. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.