Cannibals With Forks: The Triple Bottom Line Of 21st Century Business
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In the book, Cannibals with forks, John Elkington who is the author likened companies to cannibals to express corporations to devour competing corporations or industries to crave up and digest others in the traditional capitalist market. Elkington brought up an idea that forks could be an implement for these companies to switch toward to sustainability direction. As the form of a fork with three prongs, it is defined that ÐŽÒtriple bottom lineÐŽ¦ of sustainability are economic prosperity, environmental quality, and social justice. In addition, Elkington believes that it is vital and necessary to make all businesses to operate more responsibly and with concern of not only economical profit, but also environmental and social issues.
Elkington passionately demonstrates how could all businesses utility the three pronged fork to achieve sustainable development with expansion of their companiesÐŽ¦ life expectancy. Moreover, there are seven sustainable revolutions such as markets, values, transparency, life-cycle technology, partnerships, time, and corporate governance revolution which are identified by Elkington to illustrate how businesses could transform our world and spotlight some important blind-spot for leaders to think about. These revolutions are the deep current underlying much of the surface turbulence we see in todayÐŽ¦s world. Any organizations who want to assess the sustainability of its management system, operations, value chains and markets needs to consider the likely impacts of these seven sustainability revolutions.
Based on authorÐŽ¦s first-hand experience, some world well-known companies including Nike, Wal-mart, Intel, and Shell, international government agencies and non-governmental organizations are taken as examples to support his point of view and be a sample for later generations to respond challenges. Because of some misreading or failure implementation, previous experiences give corporations a lesson and force them to embrace key elements of the sustainability agenda.
Sustainable corporation is likely to become a mainstream model; therefore, Elkington suggests a thirty-night steps model for business leaders and their corporations to respond to the seven sustainability revolutions and then cater to future customers, shareholders,