The Invisible Waste of Linear Growth - SAMIN GHIASI

How modern business quietly erodes ecosystems, trust, and time.

Reading time: 6 minutes

Walk into any boardroom, flip through a pitch deck, or scan the latest product launch announcement. Underneath the polished metrics and bold projections, you’ll find the same relentless drumbeat: growth. Always more. Faster, bigger, louder.

“This drive powers entire industries. But beneath those sleek KPIs and ambitious targets, something essential is quietly disappearing—ecosystems, wellbeing, and the trust that makes sustainable business possible. All that growth begs the fundamental question: growth toward what?“

This isn’t about rejecting ambition. It’s about recognising what gets sacrificed when business follows a straight line: extract, scale, discard. The waste isn’t always visible on quarterly reports, but it’s accumulating everywhere.

1. Extraction, dressed up as innovation

When we hear “extraction,” we picture oil rigs and strip mines. But the same logic runs through digital platforms that harvest attention, agencies that burn through junior talent, and startups that treat people as scalable resources.

Consider the now-familiar pattern: hire 50 people in six months, then lay off 30 when funding tightens [1]. Or agencies that drain their teams during campaign season, calling it agility. These aren’t aberrations—they’re features of a system designed to extract value as quickly as possible.

This extraction mindset shows up everywhere:

Tech companies are shipping fast without thinking through the consequences
Marketing teams are automating before they understand their audience
Sales organisations are chasing numbers with no time to build real relationships

For leaders navigating these pressures, these aren’t abstract critiques. They’re the daily tensions behind every quarterly goal; the impossible balance between growth targets and the human cost of achieving them.

2. The hidden burnout tax

Modern workplaces rarely acknowledge the emotional overhead of constant scaling. Yet the signs are unmistakable: productivity theatre masquerading as actual results, endless Slack threads bleeding into personal time, creative professionals quietly checking out.

Hyper-growth cultures celebrate grit and output, but underneath, meaning erodes. People become metrics. Time becomes overhead. The best ideas get crushed by urgency.

“The result? Strategy shaped by investor urgency, not customer care. Speed over substance. Talent quietly disengages until they eventually walk away.“

Research shows that 75% of employees who survive layoffs report increased anxiety and diminished trust in leadership [2]. This isn’t a morale problem—it’s a design flaw in how we build companies [3].

3. Convenience that shifts the real cost

In today’s business environment, convenience usually means someone else is paying the price. That seamless customer experience? It’s built on warehouse workers tracked by algorithms through 10-hour shifts. Those AI tools that promise efficiency? They’re powered by energy-intensive data centres and precarious labour hidden from view [4].

When convenience becomes the primary metric, the true costs get pushed elsewhere:

Gig workers are absorbing all the market uncertainty
Employee mental health is sacrificed to content production cycles
Environmental impact externalised beyond the balance sheet

These hidden costs don’t disappear; they compound. What starts as frictionless efficiency eventually becomes systemically unsustainable.

Time for circular thinking

Circularity isn’t just about recycling materials. It’s about designing business systems that regenerate rather than deplete—where people, ideas, and resources can renew themselves instead of burning out.

This requires different questions:

What if regeneration is a key performance indicator?
What if we optimise for connection, not just conversion?
What if businesses strengthen the conditions they depend on?

Some companies are already experimenting with this approach. Patagonia built its resale and repair programmes into a core strategy, making product longevity a competitive advantage [5]. In B2B, cooperative platforms like Enspiral prioritise shared value creation over extraction.

Bio-innovation is opening new doors: Mycelium-based pioneers Ecovative are redesigning packaging and textiles from fungal roots—growing materials that biodegrade naturally and replace plastics in high-impact sectors. These aren’t just greener alternatives, but proof that regenerative design can scale [6].

These efforts aren’t perfect, but they prove alternatives are possible.

“The real waste isn’t inefficiency, it’s building a future on systems that systematically undermine the conditions for long-term value creation.“

Growth doesn’t have to stop. But it can be circular instead of linear. Regenerative instead of extractive. Resilient by design.

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