Triple Bottom Line. The map to building a wholesome business.

Milosz Falinski
4 min readJul 20, 2022

The most driven entrepreneurs are motivated by a very personal vision. They’ve often experienced the very lack of things they’re setting out to create with their new ventures, whether in their own lives or lives of those close to them.

Illustration by Milosz Falinski © Lumi Design

But they often don’t know how to build businesses that truly reflect their values and vision. Only a handful of people succeed in this, and a framework like Triple Bottom Line might be able to guide us on the journey.

Triple bottom line is a framework that outlines what it means to build a business that truly looks toward the future. It provides real, scientifically-grounded guidance on how to build a wholesome business — one that gives back fairly to those that founded the business, the people that surround it, and the planet that supports them all.

The framework, coined in 1990’s, is one of our first attempts at defining a wholesome business. It was famously ‘recalled’ and reviewed by the author — John Eklington. The original idea, in the form of a deep-reaching manifesto, questioning the very core of capitalism, was quickly adapted and simplified to an economic calculation, something a CEO of a big corporation may sign off and forget about.

But as author of the framework admitted, the framework itself is not enough. Eklington…

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Milosz Falinski

Milosz Falinski — founder at Lumi.design. Leads Product-market fit sprints for fast-moving founders. Strategic designer.