In 1970, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman made a claim that would go on to shape half a century of corporate behaviour. Business, he argued, has only one social responsibility: to increase profits. Everything else — concern for people, communities, or the planet — was, at best, a distraction.
That idea didn’t just influence business thinking. It became doctrine.
The result? A world in which success is measured almost exclusively by shareholder returns, while inequality widens, ecosystems collapse, and climate change accelerates. The single bottom line has delivered extraordinary wealth — and an extraordinary bill that someone else is now being asked to pay.
South Africa has long been a living contradiction to Friedman’s philosophy. Here, social and economic realities have never allowed businesses the luxury of pretending that profit exists in a vacuum. Over decades, companies have been forced — sometimes reluctantly — into a complex relationship with government and civil society, confronting the truth that business cannot thrive in a society that is failing.
During apartheid, foreign companies that chose to operate in the country, particularly American businesses guided by the Sullivan Principles, offered an early glimpse of a different model. They showed that companies could contribute meaningfully to social progress while remaining commercially viable. Corporate Social Investment (CSI) was born — initially as philanthropy, later formalised through the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) Codes of Good Practice. Progress, yes. Transformation? Not quite.
When responsibility became a checkbox
As CSI evolved into corporate social responsibility (CSR), the language became more sophisticated — but the outcomes often did not. The King Reports on Corporate Governance pushed South African companies toward the triple bottom line (TBL), urging them to measure not only profits, but also social and environmental impact.
On paper, this looked like progress. In practice, something else happened.
The triple bottom line was absorbed, sanitised, and diluted. John Elkington, who introduced the concept, now openly questions whether it has been hijacked by reporting frameworks and consultants more focused on compliance than change. Sustainability became something to be reported on, not acted on. Purpose became a paragraph in an annual report. Impact became a slide in a board presentation.
And then the pandemic arrived.
COVID-19 stripped away the theatre. It exposed which companies saw people and the planet as expendable when pressure mounted — and which truly understood their role in the societies they depend on. Many organisations that could mobilise instantly to protect profits suddenly discovered “constraints” when it came to protecting livelihoods or ecosystems.
The uncomfortable truth is this: business remains hard-wired to prioritise profit at all costs. As Elkington puts it, leaders will move heaven and earth to hit financial targets, yet rarely show the same urgency when it comes to people or planetary boundaries. The triple bottom line, for all its promise, has not buried the single bottom line. It has merely learned to coexist with it.
It’s time to stop pretending
Incremental change will not fix a system designed to extract rather than regenerate. What’s needed is not better reporting, but a fundamental reset of how value is defined and created. Elkington calls this the next evolution: a “triple helix” of value creation — a new genetic code for capitalism that actively regenerates economies, societies, and the biosphere instead of depleting them.
There are early signals that this shift is possible. The B Corp movement, now encompassing more than 3,400 certified businesses globally, is challenging the idea that profit and purpose are mutually exclusive. These companies are structured to serve all stakeholders — not as an act of charity, but as a strategy for long-term resilience. They aim to be not merely “best in the world,” but “best for the world.”
The future of business will not be decided by slogans or sustainability reports. It will be decided by choices — especially in moments of crisis. In a world defined by volatility, inequality, and ecological limits, strategies that are pro-human, pro-planet, and pro-shareholder are no longer idealistic. They are pragmatic.
The real question is not whether business can afford to change.
It’s whether it can afford not to