Top Series of 2013

While we love bringing you the daily news, it's always a special treat here at TriplePundit to take a deep dive on a core issue in our work and bring you a variety of stories on that specific topic. Here are the series we ran which brought in the biggest traffic, a sure sign for us that we've struck a nerve. Click through and check out some of the posts!

We Ask, They Answer: Women In CSR, a 3p interview series
In January 2013 I penned a post spotlighting 35 women in CSR that have been doing great work across all industries. The response was remarkable, with hundreds of shares and dozens of people commenting to share the names of women we missed.

We wanted to delve deeper into the story of women in CSR. We launched this series of interviews, edited by Andrea Newell, with leading CSR practitioners in order to understand what makes these women tick and how they found their way into sustainability careers. Learn about what inspires these women and gain insight into how to craft your own career path. The insights in these interviews are valuable to anyone in CSR and sustainability.

The Business Of Biking: Building the Business Case for Bicycle Advocacy
This series builds the business case for promoting cycling at the workplace and advocating for bicycle infrastructure. We teamed up with NGO People for Bikes to make this series possible.

What Is The Social Responsibility Of Business?
This question is one of the fundamentals of sustainable business - is profit the only responsibility of businesses, and if not, how can we quantify the other benefits. Ever since Milton Friedman famously proclaimed “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits” (NYTimes 1970), pundits have pondered whether his purist interpretation was really the only way.

Profit is certainly a lot easier to quantify than something like happiness, but the intangible benefits of good, honest business clearly go way beyond pure finance….Must the word "profit" always refer to money in the strictest sense?

Collected on this page are various interpretations of the idea of “social responsibility” and the responsibility of business to take an active, passive or indifferent role in building a more sustainable world.

Triple Bottom Line: Understanding People, Planet & Profit for Responsible Business
The Triple Bottom Line - the core of what we cover here at TriplePundit - considers the social, environmental and financial performance of an organization. At it's core, triple bottom line thinking ties the social and environmental impact of an organization’s activities to its economic performance.

Although all of TriplePundit’s articles attempt to address the systemic thinking that underlines the triple bottom line, the articles on this page were chosen specifically for their more direct approach to the issue.

The Rise of The Sharing Economy
The “sharing economy” describes a type of business built on the sharing of resources – allowing customers to access goods when needed. Think AirBnb or Zipcar. While the sharing of goods has always been a common practice among friends, family and neighbors, in recent years, the concept of sharing has moved from a community practice into a profitable business model. This increasing legitimacy is reflected in the more polished terms used to describe the phenomenon like peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, collaborative consumption or the access economy.

Some advocates wax philosophical that this emerging sharing economy has come about because society has collectively arrived at a more altruistic place in our evolution: we don’t all need to own drills or KitchenAid mixers – since most owners only get a few minutes of use out of them a year. Others simply attribute it to Clinton’s old adage, “it’s the economy, stupid,” with trying financial times forcing us to reevaluate the way we interact with one another and with the resources we have at hand. Whether it is a monetary or social paradigm shift, Time considers the access economy to be one of “10 Ideas That Will Change the World.” We agree.

As a proof-of-concept, we funded this series through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

If you missed any of these series, now is a great time to catch up! We have a few exciting article series planned for the first quarter of 2014 - stay tuned!