Entry # 11 – The Triple Bottom Line: Planet

Ever since the start of the term, the focus of this course has always been about the triple bottom line with the objective of teaching fair treatment and good governance. But for this week, the main focus was about business ethics and environmental values.

The environment was created to beautify the planet and to feed the needs of humankind. But some people just fail to see the importance of sustaining our natural resources and instead they use them to feed their personal desires in the hope of making themselves wealthy and rich. Though most of these people are aiming for holistic development, they are also contributing to the destruction of the environment.

As what the Triple Bottom Line approach says, businesses must also know their responsibility in sustaining the natural environment. Not only because it is our main source of human needs, but also because humans depend on the environment in order to survive.

As a student who’s in the field of business, the triple bottom line helped me understand how things should work in the business world. We should not only consider the people and the profits earned by a business firm, but also the planet where its resources are coming from.

I guess the most important thing that I learned from this discussion is that we should set aside our self-interests for a while and think of what’s the most efficient and effective thing/decision to implement without actually hurting the environment nor the people around us.

Entry # 10 – Output Consultation (Third and Last Community Visit)

Today was our group’s third and last visit to the community of Barrio Magsaysay, Tondo, Manila. 9 ‘o’ clock was our call time and we left the school at around 9:30 in the morning. Needless to say, we were only less than 10 for today’s visit. We had our drafts ready for their confirmation, hoping that we were able to satisfy their needs. We arrived at the community past ten in the morning and as usual, we were welcomed by the teachers in the day care center with smiles on their faces.

We started the day with a prayer and then continued to work on the outputs we made. We showed our drafts, which is basically what we have worked on in the past few days. What was assigned to us was the pamphlet mainly about the community’s profile, incorporated with the informations we have gathered from the last time’s visit. Their feedback was, the content of our output was insufficient.

It was a bit disappointing, in my opinion. The fact that we have gathered all the informations needed from the secretary of the barangay, we could have perhaps included all the necessary datas needed for the community’s profile. They explained to us that the barangay hall was not actually updated with the current situation of the whole community, thus, some of the informations we have gathered were already old and not up to date.

We had to conduct another interview and had to collect another set of information but this time, the updated ones. A lot of revisions will be made and hopefully, we’d be able to finish our output on time. I guess the lesson that I learned today was that the use of only one source is not valid enough to be used as a fact. This can also be applied in the business world. Having your research skills enhanced will help you to produce an output that is verifiable, an output that can be considered as factual.

Complaining will take you nowhere. Part of being a student is to be responsible and part of learning is to be professional. I guess what we can do now, as a group, is to be responsible and be professional. We’ll do our best to complete what is asked of us and meet their expectations.