The Decoy of Growth - part 1/3

0:01 Roger, Charlie, we're ready to rock.

0:06 Here's a stat that you probably don't know. A study out of the London Business School found that approximately 70% of organizational complexity, new divisions, new markets, expanded headcount generates no measurable increase in actual value. What? It just generates more organization, more emails, more meetings about the meetings, more people whose job is to coordinate the people who are trying to coordinate the work. 70% That means the majority of what we call growth is, statistically speaking, noise dressed up in a suit.

0:53 And subscribe.

0:58 Break your night. And yet we cannot stop. We chase it like it owes us something. What the hell are? You talking about? Welcome to Unusual Practice, the podcast where we take the ideas running your business, your brain, and your bad decisions, and we hold them up to the light until they get uncomfortable. I'm your host, Charlie, and today we're talking about the most seductive Lion business that expanding outward is the same thing as moving forward. Let me paint you a picture. Aceo, let's call him Marcus because that feels right, wakes up at 4:47 AM for the third running night.

1:41 The company is growing, revenue is up, the team is bigger. There's a new product line, a new market, a consultancy just told him he should be in Southeast Asia by Q3. And Marcus? Well, he's miserable. Not in AI. Need a vacation way. In a deeper, quieter way. In the way where success feels like a hallway that keeps getting longer instead of a door that finally opens. Don't forget, don't like and subscribe. What Marcus is experiencing has a name, and it's not burnout. It's what philosopher Albert Borgman called hyperactivity as concealment, the use of relentless motion to avoid confronting a question.

2:27 You don't want to answer the question. In Marcus's case, what is all this actually for?

2:37 That's the question scaling is designed to defer. New markets mean new urgency. New urgency means no space for introspection. No space for introspection means the question never gets answered. It's a beautiful system if you're trying to avoid yourself,

2:59 but there's a part to this that never gets put in the investor deck. The more sophisticated the expansion strategy, the more sophisticated the avoidance. These aren't people running away from failure, they're running away from success that doesn't feel like what they thought it would. And that distinction matters a lot. You see, there's a paradox that emerges somewhere around the second funding round, or the 4th market entry, or the third strategic rebrand. The more you build, the smaller the room feels in Confucian management philosophy.

3:38 And yes, this existed long before Mackenzie repackaged it. There's a concept called Wei Woo Wei, purposeful non action, the idea that forced movement creates more resistance than it resolves, that the leader who constantly pushes often ends up pushing in circles. Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, specifically in the Finnish model of business leadership, there is a cultural concept called sizu that gets misquoted as grit or toughness, but its deeper meaning is knowing when not to act. The restraint is the strength.

4:18 Compare that to the dominant Western model, growth as moral virtue, the assumption that bigger is not just better, it's evidence of worthiness. If you're not scaling, you're stagnating. If you're not expanding, you're contracting. There is no neutral gear. This is not just cultural conditioning, it's deeply psychological. In behavioral economics, there's a well documented phenomenon called action bias. Humans consistently prefer doing something over doing nothing, even when doing nothing is statistically the better choice.

4:57 The most famous study on this was about goalkeepers and penalty shootouts. Goalkeepers who stayed in the center of the goal had a higher save rate, but only about 6% of goalkeepers chose to stand still. The rest dove left or right, because looking like you're doing something feels safer than doing nothing, even when doing nothing is right. Now imagine that goalkeeper owns a Series B startup. The bias doesn't go away with success. It gets amplified by it. Because now doing nothing isn't just personally uncomfortable, it's a fiduciary question.

5:40 You're accountable to people, and people want movement. So you move into Southeast Asia, into a new product vertical and to a partnership that makes strategic sense but feels hollow from the moment you shake hands. And now here's where it gets really interesting. Because this isn't actually about ambition. It's actually about identity. And those are two entirely different problems with two entirely different solutions. In 2019, philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervecki delivered a lecture series at the University of Toronto called it Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which sounds like a self help title but is actually a dense philosophical excavation of why modern, successful, educated people feel profoundly empty.

6:32 His core thesis? We have systematically dismantled the frameworks, religious, communal, philosophical, that once gave humans a sense of relevance, of mattering, A fitting into something larger than themselves. And into that void, we've inserted productivity, we've inserted metrics, we've inserted the next market. Now here's the intersection that nobody at your last off site talked about. When ACEO is operating from an unresolved meaning crisis, they make growth decisions that look strategic but are actually existential.

7:13 They're not expanding the company. They're trying to expand themselves into a version that finally feels like enough. The acquisition isn't about market share, it is about the story. The rebrand isn't about clarity, it's about trying on a new identity. The new vertical isn't about revenue diversification. It's about avoiding the silence that comes when the original purpose has been quietly fulfilled and nobody knows what comes next. Unusual practice takes you where most conversations never go. Hidden histories, counterintuitive truths, and cultural twists that flip your perspective.

7:54 Deep ideas delivered short and sharp, just minutes that feel like years of discovery. You'll learn what most people miss in a lifetime, giving you the kind of knowledge that sparks conversations, ignites debates, and makes people lean in closer, Concise, surprising, and impossible to ignore. Swap power for valuation and pleasure for market expansion. And you've described at least half of the leadership teams currently in growth mode. Let me get a bit more precise here. Movement is activity that produces the sensation of progress.

8:33 Progress is activity that produces the outcome you actually need. They can overlap, and sometimes they do, but they are not the same thing, and in high pressure environments they get deliberately conflated, often by the person who benefits most from the confusion. The German sociologist Hartman Rosa has written extensively about what he calls social acceleration, the modern phenomenon in which the speed of change itself becomes the primary value, not what changes, not whether the change is useful, just the fact that things are moving fast.

9:11 Speed as proof of relevance. He argues compellingly that in this framework, standing still is socially coded as failure regardless of the actual outcomes. Which means even if scaling is making things worse, the act of scaling looks like you're doing your job, and the act of pausing to evaluate, which is actually the harder, braver move, looks like you've lost the plot. And This is why the cage keeps getting smaller. You're not trapped by your constraint, you're trapped by the meaning system that tells you only constant motion proves your worth.

9:54 The cage is not your market. The cage is not your competition. The cage is the belief that slowing down is losing. But here's what a very small number of founders have figured out, and it's counterintuitive enough that most people dismiss it the first time they hear it. There's a commercial insight buried in all of this philosophy, and it's one of the more elegant ones I've come across. When you as a leader can visibly and articulately distinguish between movement and progress, when you can walk into a room and say we're going to stop doing three things that look like growth and start doing one thing that actually is, you're not just making a strategic decision, you're making an identity statement.

10:44 And identity statements in a market full of noise are devastatingly rare. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, who was, among other things, the wealthiest man in Rome and advisor to Nero, so he understood what it meant to have power and feel it mean nothing, wrote. It is not that I am brave enough to face death, it is that I am brave enough to face life without mistaking activity for living. That's not a motivational poster. That's a boardroom policy. Because here's what the companies that figure this out discover.

11:17 Restraint signals confidence. Contraction done consciously communicates that you understand your value well enough not to dilute it. Look at the Swiss watch industry in the 1970s when Seiko and the quartz movement arrived. Swiss manufacturers had a binary choice, scale aggressively to compete on price and volume, or contract deliberately around craft and meaning. Most tried to scale. Most are gone. The ones who contracted, who said no, actually, fewer products, higher precision. This specific thing and nothing else didn't just survive, they became the category.

12:00 Or how about the Danish furniture company Carl Henson and Stone? For decades, almost nobody outside of design circles knew the name. They made the same chairs Hans Begner designed in 1949, and they refused to modernize the line, refused to diversify, and the temptation to expand must have been quite enormous for them. They are now one of the most respected furniture manufacturers in the world, and they still make essentially the same chairs. That's not stubbornness. That's a clarity that most growth strategies actively destroy.

12:39 So if you're Marcus or Marcus adjacent, here's a question that actually matters. What would you build if you weren't afraid that not building was failure? Because that question usually points directly at the thing you've been avoiding. The product that doesn't scale easily but solves a real problem. The niche that requires depth instead of breadth. The conversation with your team that needs to happen before you enter any new market. So there are three practical places where this shows up, and they're worth naming plainly.

13:18 First, the portfolio audit nobody wants to do. Not a financial audit, a purpose audit for every initiative you're currently running. The question is not is this generating revenue, but does this require us to be uniquely good at something, or could any well funded competitor do exactly this? If the answer is anyone could do it, you're not in growth strategy. You're in a commodity play dressed up as a vision 2nd the decision you've been calling a strategy question. Most CE OS have one decision they've been avoiding for between six months and three years.

14:04 Trust me, I know. They know what it is and it usually involves either something they should stop doing, someone they should have a hard conversation with, or a direction they should commit to but haven't because committing means closing other doors. The new market is not the solution to that decision. It's a way of not making it. And 3rd, the identity work that doesn't show up on any agenda. This sounds soft, but it is far from that. The leaders who've done the work, who have some clarity on what they actually want to build and why, make structurally better decisions than the ones who have not.

14:46 Not because they're more enlightened, because they have fewer internal conflicts muddying the signal. They can distinguish between a good opportunity and a good looking distraction. That is, practically speaking, one of the most valuable skills in business. Here's the thing about cages that expand. You don't always notice them expanding until you try to stop. Most leaders find out what their cage is made of not during a strategic review, but in a quiet Tuesday morning when the meetings haven't started yet and the notifications haven't loaded and there's a brief, accidental window of silence.

15:31 Like. Comment and. Subscribe.

15:36 And in that silence, if you sit with it instead of immediately filling it with a podcast or a Slack message or flight to Singapore, you might notice something. The question is still there, the one the scaling was supposed to answer. What is this for? Unusual practice. Rethink what you think you know.

16:05 And the uncomfortable truth, the one Marcus is slowly working out at 4:47 AM, is that no new market has ever answered it. No higher valuation, no reorg, no product launch. The question is patient. It will wait. The only variable is how much you build around it before you decide to actually answer it. If this episode made you slightly uncomfortable, good. That means it worked. And also that you should probably subscribe, because I charge absolutely nothing for this level of unsolicited existential crisis.

16:50 Reviews help other people find the show, which means more people lying awake at 4:47 AM wondering if their Q3 expansion plan is actually just unprocessed feelings. We're building a community, guys, basically. Also, if you want to go deeper on any of this, we have a newsletter. It comes out irregularly because we're practicing what we preach. Until next time, stay curious, stay deliberate, and for the love of everything, stop scheduling meetings about meetings. Mom, somebody just followed me. Very nice.