What Is Business As Usual And Why It Is Your Business' Worst Enemy

Apr 1

In this blog post, we want to offer a simple explanation of what we mean when we talk about “business as usual”, in which contexts we can come across business-as-usual strategies, and why these strategies are harmful and inconvenient for your growth and impact goals.

If you feel like in the online business space, everyone is using the same strategy patterns (writing the same content, talking about the same topics, using the same visuals, etc.), well… you’re right!

We call this… business as usual.

You have probably come across the term “business as usual” before.

But if you are new to it or still unclear about what this means and why many talk about it in negative terms, we are here to help!

What Is Business As Usual?

Business as usual is a term that refers to a way of doing business based on standard or traditional business strategies.

But what is “standard” or “traditional”?

To answer this question, we need to look deeper into the business system and tap into the broader cultural context.

Businesses Are A Product Of Capitalism

We don’t want to make this blog post too long and for the sake of length, we won’t go into too much in detail about the history of business, economy and capitalism.

However, to grasp what business as usual is, it’s important to understand that:

Capitalism is our larger economic framework.
Capitalism is the system ruling our economy and entrepreneurship system.
The capitalist system centers the logic of profit over the logic of nature, humans and community.

In the capitalist system, we understand businesses as all activities we engage with to generate profit (businesses are mechanisms that exist to generate profit by producing goods or services).

This makes the world of business intrinsically linked to capitalist rules and therefore rooted in profit-first logic.

So, when we “do business,” we, by default, engage with practices that are rooted in capitalist logic.

What It Means To “Do Business” And Why It Is A Highly Sensitive Process

To simplify this, let’s think of “doing business” as the process of offering a solution that responds to a specific group or a target audience’s problem and creating visibility around the value of this solution.

In doing business, the assumption is that our audience has a problem and we have (or create) a solution that will fix it.

Therefore, “doing business” often comes down to the process of making our target audience more aware that this solution exists.

But the way businesses create visibility around their “solution” is by stressing the existence of the problem.

Now, if you think about your own experience, you probably recognize that when you have a problem or a challenge, it’s never just a “technical” problem or challenge (it’s never so “transactional”).

Your problem or challenge often generates a need and a desire for a solution, touching a deeper layer of your experience.

Our economy knows that very well. They also know that our society is made by complex humans with nuanced experiences which often present a multitude of needs and desires.

If the market can come up with “solutions” to all these needs and desires (and even create new ones!), this becomes a “business” model with exponential growth potential.

As you can see, it’s not a coincidence that human needs are powerful market drives: the market recognizes a profit opportunity based on the needs of consumers and builds services or products that deliver solutions based on this neediness.

Why And When Is This Unethical?

In business, when we focus on leveraging problems (or creating new ones), we often do it by leveraging human neediness, desires and personal vulnerabilities, which means we’re stepping into a very sensitive field.

The paradox is that the business world often claims to be a very transactional experience (not intersecting with the personal or political dimensions, but just offering an answer to market demand).

While in reality, business strategies are rooted into and have developed their strength based on the power of human psychology to expand and drive market demands.

So, “doing business” comes with a primary transactional goal that, however, taps into the complexity of the human experience to achieve this goal and generate more profit.

In this scheme, doing business translates into a process of constantly awakening neediness and leveraging the deep desires of consumers to sell the relevancy of a service or a product (the solution) and make money out of it.

But when we engage with activities that handle people’s neediness, vulnerabilities and personal experience to support profit purposes, there is where we need to start asking more ethical questions.

This IS The Business As Usual

When we talk about business as usual, we refer to business strategies that link to this culture of doing business and are designed to manipulate the consumers to support profit-first logic.

These strategies teach tactics and systems that help business owners persuade or manipulate as many people as possible to buy from them.

The manipulation works by leveraging the sense of neediness, creating urgency and fear in the consumers and ultimately leading people to believe they should buy those products or services to fix their problems.

Do We Have To Stop Doing Business?

Knowing how the traditional business logic works makes us want to stop doing business for good.

But is stopping business how we challenge capitalist systems?

The short answer is: it depends.

It’s important to continue imagining new economy and business models that radically advance equity and community care. However, the change is more a spectrum of activities than a "polarized” solution.

We think that you don’t have to necessarily stop doing business.

But you need to start doing business differently and question traditional business strategies if you aim to create a positive impact through your work.

Doing business more ethically is an opportunity to root into different strategies that help us recenter the logic of people (humanity), nature (sustainability), and community (collectiveness) and reject the overpowering logic of profit.

We cannot entirely separate businesses from the spectrum of capitalist practices (reminder: capitalism is a system and most of us still exist in, support and benefit from it, regardless of how much we try to challenge it).

But we can actively question the most harmful practices of capitalism and reject systems of exploitation, extraction and competition by learning to do business through different values and strategies.

What Does Ethical Business Growth Look Like?

Prioritizing new values is key when you aim to grow your business more ethically.

People over profit.
Community over individualism.
Critical privilege awareness over narratives of inequalities.
Respect for the land over imperialism and new colonialism (digital!).

If you desire to engage with more ethical business growth, you need to run your business as a conscious leader and make more ethical decisions that can create a system of entrepreneurship supportive of people, nature, and community.

This is possible and a lot of entrepreneurs are already embracing unconventional business practices that create sustainable benefits for themselves and their communities.

How Business As Usual Locks Down Our Business Growth

The business as usual is not only unethical, but it also represents a risk to your business's sustainability, profitability and longevity.

Business-As-Usual makes our experience harder

It prioritizes competition, manipulation, extractive practices and exploitation. These practices make our experience more stressful and disconnected from ethical purposes.
It puts you under a lot of pressure to make everything about your business about money.
It is tiring. Business as usual pushes you to run and stress and hustle all the time. But entrepreneurship is a long-term run. You need to use your energy wisely if you aim to keep running with it consistently.
It’s triggering. Many people end up doing business the same way, causing unnecessary competition and comparison dynamics that trigger us.
Traditional business strategies overlook the human side of the experience, causing:

harmful practices against yourself (hustle, work stress, scarcity mindset, burnout, cycles of debts)
harmful practices against your community (discrimination, reinforcement of privileges, manipulative tactics, etc.).

Blocking innovation and creativity

When you grow your business by sticking to the business as usual, you naturally fall into similar strategy patterns that make your brand look like precisely the rest of the series of online copy-paste entities.

Ultimately, amongst different reasons, business as usual is a big blocker to your business growth because it inhibits your creativity, innovation and authenticity and forces you to do business the way everyone else is doing it.

If you want to learn how to make your brand stand out and turn your business into a CATALYST of social impact, read Why You Should Develop Your Leadership Skills To Boost Your Business Growth.

Do you want to know what business growth strategies exist outside the business as usual and learn how these can leverage your business success?

Book A Discovery Call and let’s talk!

Margherita Sgorbissa