The role of business schools in developing leaders for triple bottom line sustainability

The creation and impact of triple bottom line (TBL) practices and thinking is a fundamentally challenging proposition. While there is much agreement that these approaches are necessary, there is a need to build the capacity to make these concepts into practical realities. Business schools are a particularly effective leverage point for enabling sustainability to become a more widespread and more impactful proposition. They have two fundamentally powerful aspects to them: the large numbers of students attending a wide variety of programmes and their capacity for creating events that will attract discussion of these issues. It is essential, in both of these areas, that while unique components of different sustainability concepts are built, the focus is on putting these ideas into a wider “business” context. This will help to connect these practices together, ensuring that TBL and related approaches become part and parcel of good business practice and not just a niche “nice to have”.