I am an entrepreneur. There, I've admitted it. And, like many such folk, I can lose interest in earlier adventures. So I now spend little time promoting the triple bottom line, a management concept I launched nearly 15 years ago. But its acknowledgement that markets can create economic, social and environmental forms of value (or destroy them) still holds true.

And what is true of corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is equally true of countries. Think of China, to which most pundits accord a bright future. That country now faces a disorienting triple crunch, and its responses will powerfully shape our world 15 years hence.
The economic crunch is still unfolding before our eyes, but something a senior western banker said, as the global system tottered, sticks in my mind. He told the Financial Times that Chinese officials "seemed as if they were observing events on another planet". In a way, that's true: China has been wary of complex financial instruments such as derivatives. But, while it may have had little direct exposure to the toxic assets that poisoned the US economy, China is highly vulnerable to an economic crunch as the West edges into a 1990s-style recession.

This makes the current social (or, more precisely, health) crunch even more worrying for the Chinese. The country's chief quality regulator may have resigned in the wake of the tainted milk scandal that put some 13,000 children into hospital, but such problems are very unhelpful when some western companies are thinking about repatriating outsourced or offshored operations.

Still, it's the third-environmental-crunch that will have the greatest long-term impact. Some critics in China may devoutly wish that their country operated on a different planet, but it doesn't, and won't, even if it achieves more successful extra-terrestrial space missions. Climate change underscores that uncomfortable reality.

My entrepreneurial instincts tell me that China's emerging strategy, as we head towards the Copenhagen COP-15 climate summit late next year, will be critical. What sort of game will China play? We get our best insights into the character of people—and countries—when they're crunched. The crunch on credit is only the beginning.