The Quadruple Bottom Line – How The Hoodie Became The Fourth Pillar in Business Ventures

There is an invite to meditative painting-friday in your google calendar, and you are encouraged to wear athleisure to the event. A marketing intern has asked you to do a quick interview for the company’s social channels, and requested not that you comment on the new onboarding programme, but instead show what is in your…

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There is an invite to meditative painting-friday in your google calendar, and you are encouraged to wear athleisure to the event. A marketing intern has asked you to do a quick interview for the company’s social channels, and requested not that you comment on the new onboarding programme, but instead show what is in your bag that you bring to work every day or what is on your spotify wrapped this year. Your colleague walks over to your desk in the open landscape office with exposed brick walls and ceiling beams, asking about a CC he needs for an investor pitch, sunglasses covering his eyes although inside, because he is slightly hungover from yesterday. You hop on a zoom call, and on screen are people cross-legged on their couches, wearing hoodies, discussing millions of dollars in venture capital. We are witnessing a paradigm shift of corporate culture in real time, with a new generation assuming influential positions, challenging the deeply rooted ways of the traditional corporate world. Turns out that the real disruptor was not blockchain – it was kombucha. 

The Triple Bottom Line is a term that has been tossed around quite a bit. At its core, it is a way to conceptualise a shift that occurred in business strategy priorities, where the former main aim of turning a profit ceased to suffice and needed to be balanced with an organization’s environmental and social impact. The conceptual model is an abstraction of the core pillars of successful business ventures, boiled down to the three P’s: People, Planet and Profit. Initially a valuable tool in shaping business success, with ever changing markets, corporate environments and consumer behaviours, it’s becoming more and more obsolete, and has emerged into a myriad of versions of an expanded, quadruple, bottom line; Cambridge Leadership Development calls for Progress as the fourth pillar, MDPI published a thesis suggesting Purpose as the fourth pillar, and here I am, suggesting to you another, less conventional option, the PJ’s as the fourth pillar.  

Gen Z is another one of those terms that is tossed around a lot in the media, often with negative connotations if the narrator is not part of the generation themselves. For the sake of clarity we will define it solely as the group of people born somewhere between the mid 90’s and late 00’s. If you will allow some generalizations, Gen z is a generation of social activism like many optimistic youths before them, only they are operating largely in a new landscape, a digital one. Beyond being digital natives, they are often ascribed qualities like open minded, inclusive, politically correct and anti-establishment. Raised in an age of innovation and social disruption, it’s a generation that preempts new prerequisites and seems to lack patience with business norms that once were accepted without proper justification. This change of attitude is seeping into an exponentially greater number of contexts as gen z is coming of age to venture out into the world to become colleagues, parents, teachers, managers and start-up CEOs. And what about gen z and all this supposed change in corporate culture? I’d like to title them architects of informality. Or maybe M&A specialists, acquiring the private on the job. Meetings have become hybrid activities, altering gantt charts with pausing mics to open the door for food deliveries, revenue charts with walking the dog around the block. Email sign-offs are no longer solely auto-piloted stiff pleasantries but personal, expressive and fun communication, replacing “Best regards” with “Plz don’t fire me” or “Stay hydrated”.  The philosophy this new generation brings is one that flattens the organizational hierarchies, literally and figuratively speaking, putting individuality and authenticity right up there next to rigid conformity in open office landscapes and digital slack boardrooms. 

It is about the aesthetic of success really. About reframing the semiotics to fit new prerogatives. The suit is an easy one to decipher, it is associated with professionalism and authority. The comfy wear would instead be associated with informality, not applying oneself or even laziness. But with the reframing, the hoodie instead is becoming associated with authenticity, transparency, personal comfort and well-being. Being casual on the job is no longer a sign of arrogance, or in any way telling of a person’s influence or authority. Instead it mediates a company’s, or even an entire generation’s, values. It tells a story of compassion for people’s differences and how competence on the job can far exceed arbitrary mannerisms and fashion sense. It tells a story of inclusivity and humbleness, accepting how people can go about completing something in very different ways while still achieving equally great results. 

Maybe we owe this development, at least in part, to the ways in which we now gain insight into people’s lives compared to the way we used to; Once, people could choose to be sealed off, only exposing fractions of their lives in constructed contexts, but with social media everyone’s personal life is suddenly at our disposal. CEO’s of multimillion dollar corporations are briefing their thought processes on naming their children on twitter, actors are sharing with us intimate moments in their shower to promote new shampoos on tiktok, and with the walls tumbling down, maybe we are collectively learning that even the most influential people are regular humans at their core, and maybe that is also why we collectively begin to accept the new work culture that is emerging, where someone need not be unattainable to be influential; Where influential people struggle with their relationships, bicker with their partners over what brand of oats to buy, have anxieties and insecurities. Maybe the PJ’s, the office hoodies, are a symbol for humanity, and maybe as humans we are learning to embrace humanity in others. Maybe we have redesigned the same strictly norm bound corporate culture of do’s and don’ts in more modern packaging, with a new protocol for precisely how to act in corporate environments, or maybe we simply just enjoy the occasional kombucha and hoodie. 

About Nådiga Lundtan

Founded in 1948 and has since been an important part of student life in the economics program at Lund University. Nådiga Lundtan covers a wide range of topics related to economics, society, and politics, as well as careers, entrepreneurship, and innovation. It is a platform for students to share their ideas and opinions on economics and related fields.

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