How Small Businesses Can Model Values That Corporations Can’t
Sometimes it feels naïve to believe small businesses can change anything at all. And yet… I have to believe. I simply have to.
This week, there was another school shooting. When I first saw the news, I felt numb. I clicked into the first article, scanning for a face or name I knew, knowing a couple of moms in that area. My throat clogged with a lump, and I scrolled away, looking for a quick hit of dopamine, like I’ve been trained to do since Columbine.
Instead of a cat video, I landed on my state’s Attorney General posting “thoughts and prayers” and some vague line about “violence and hate.”
That’s where numbness gave way to rage.
Because this is the same office that is loudly pro-police, pro-ICE, pro-regulating women’s bodies. Their values are not hidden; they’re written into policy. So I said so: thoughts and prayers aren’t enough—gun control would do more. You co-sign violence and hate every single day.
The pile-on came, of course. Strangers calling me stupid, vile, ignorant. Congratulating me on “being the first to blame Trump.” But shootings have spanned every president since 1999. This is about an entire system that protects the NRA, starves mental health care, and decides that money speaks louder than children’s lives.
When leaders default to “thoughts and prayers,” they present inaction as neutral. As if neutrality were possible. But it isn’t. It’s a choice—a choice that encodes whose lives matter and whose don’t.
That realization stayed with me later in the week, sitting in rooms with small business owners asking honest questions: What if the way we’ve always done things isn’t working? What if we build differently?
The whiplash was real. From policy that codifies violence to founders trying to codify care. And that’s when the parallel clicked: just as politicians hide behind the neutrality of “thoughts and prayers,” business leaders often hide behind the neutrality of “best practices.” Both encode values. Both decide what gets protected—and who pays the cost.
Values aren’t neutral. They’re structural.
Every choice we make, from the hierarchies we replicate to the metrics we chase, even what we call “professional,” encodes values. And if we don’t pay attention, we end up rebuilding the same systems we say we’re resisting.
That’s why I keep coming back to small business. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s one of the few places where we can practice something different. Where we spend a third of our lives (at work, inside the systems we build together) is one of the most powerful places to model other futures.
Small businesses can try on structures that corporations weighed down by legacy systems will never risk. We don’t have to compete with their size to matter. We can show another way, one choice at a time, and let it ripple outward.
Which brings me to a thread I’ll return to from time to time:
↺ Rethinking Best Practices
You’ll notice this marker when I’m pulling apart the norms we’ve been told are neutral, and asking what they actually encode.
So let’s start with one of the most lauded “best practices” in tech.
For years, I’ve told the parable every growth strategist knows: if a new user made seven friends in ten days, Facebook found, they were far more likely to stick around. That little story spread through Silicon Valley like scripture: Find your North Star metric, and growth will follow.
I repeated it myself again this week. I was talking through our 90-day metrics and the build plan for our MVP, reverse engineering our strategy with the team: “What’s our seven friends in ten days?” I started recounting the story to them, and then I stopped cold.
Because that metric wasn’t about care—it was about stickiness. It wasn’t asking: Did this connection create meaning? Did it offer joy, relief, or support? It was asking: Did it hook you? Did it keep you here longer?
The brilliance of “seven friends in ten days” is also its harm: it reframed human connection as an input on a dashboard. Relationships became levers to pull, not values to uphold. In other words, Facebook didn’t care if you found joy—it cared if you stuck around.
That’s the sleight of hand in so many “best practices.” They sound neutral, even noble. But underneath, they encode growth-at-all-costs, compulsion not contribution, stickiness not care.
And when we borrow those metrics uncritically, we risk building businesses that reproduce the same logic: keep people circling, keep them engaged, keep them inside. Even if what they really need is a boundary, an exit, or a pause.
The same neutrality that codifies violence in policy can codify extraction in business.
So I’m asking myself a different question now: What would a values-aligned North Star look like?
Maybe it’s not about how long someone stays, but how supported they feel when they leave. Not how often they return, but how deeply they’re changed when they do. Maybe the better metric isn’t retention at all. Maybe it’s whether your system gave something back instead of only taking.
I don’t have the neat formula yet. But I know this: neutrality is never neutral. Not in policy, not in business. The question is whether what we’re building codifies care — or something closer to harm.
And if that’s true, then here’s the real practice: noticing where I’m still upholding values I don’t believe in, and being willing to rewrite the script.
xo,
Brittany
P.S. If this week’s reflection on best practices hit home, here’s where I help leaders put it into practice:
Start By Listening → My private podcast, COO-fessions, is where I name the ruptures and repairs that never make it into glossy case studies.
Step Into a Session → A Studio Session is two hours of deep pattern recognition with yours truly, resetting friction points before urgency becomes your operating system.
Rebuild the System → For leaders who know the whole structure needs re-setting, the Studio Sequence and Re:Alignment Studio are where we design for sustainability instead of collapse over a more in depth partnership. Apply for a 30 minute Studio Inquiry if you’r interested in going deeper with me.
Because just like metrics, business models aren’t neutral—they encode values. The question is whether yours is designed for extraction, or for sustainability.
