3 annoying business clichés you need to ignore

Are you jumping from meeting to meeting working smarter, not harder, while circling the wagons with your team so they know they should always be closing? Or at the end of the day, are you just going through the motions to hit the ground running to deliver maximum customer value? These business clichés are a dime a dozen.

While some succinctly convey valuable insight, others give your team advice that is objectively proven bad for your firm. No matter your role, experience, or company, you can probably expect at least one business saying per meeting.

Often these clichés sound like a stroke of genius. Imagine a heated internal meeting where someone takes a dramatic pause and drops a popularly accepted business “truth-ism.” They summarize a complex conversation into one bite-size comment which is obviously good because, you know, time is money.

The truth is we take these business clichés at face value because we need to. If you’re like most people, your work is more complex than ever and you’re exhausted. Case in point, the latest Stress in America Survey revealed that 58% of adults aged 18 to 34 describe their daily stress as “completely overwhelming,” and nearly half report that most days their stress is so bad they’re “unable to function.” Many people accept business clichés without challenging them simply to maintain their sanity.

I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad is clear. A meaningful number of business clichés are wrong. The good news? These three common business clichés can be solidly debunked.

‘Bigger is better’

It’s easy (and a business cliché) to view a bigger company as a sign of stability and solvency. From the outside looking in, the arithmetic is simple: the bigger the company—that is, the more staff it has—the more money it must have and therefore the more stable it must be. But here’s the rub: It depends.

In the case of a startup, most people determine or presume your company is credible by investigating how many people work there and how much funding you’ve received. However, these metrics are not good indicators of stability. For many startups, the former necessitates the latter. Capital is injected, the business is artificially inflated, investors urge founders to get big fast, and after about four years, those businesses—approximately 75% of all venture-backed firms— fail. Bigger doesn’t mean better in a startup. It’s a vanity metric.

As for established businesses, their appeal is that many individuals view those companies as so big that they cannot fail. We know by now that simply isn’t true. The collapse of financial behemoths in 2008, or even the massive layoffs after the pandemic, have made that painfully clear.

It’s not about being big. Regardless of size, it’s about being a sound, highly profitable, and mission-driven organization.

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’

This business cliché is one of my favorites, particularly as a SaaS founder, because engineers are often its most dogmatic believers. If you truly believe you can ignore your legacy products or tech debt, you’re setting yourself up for failure. If you don’t continuously improve your products and the systems behind them, your company will face potentially existential challenges.

For startups early in their journey, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a threat on the horizon. As you continue to gain customers, grow your business, and like with my startup, write more code, you’ll begin to see cracks in your product armor.

Legacy product issues are nasty. Why? Using a SaaS company as an example, some legacy code is plain bad, some is good, and most is foundational. There are a bunch of ways this code regularly affects your product. As we all know, software eventually breaks, there’s no way around it. One day, that legacy code you’ve relied on for years will start malfunctioning or not work at all.

Take for example the Log4J crisis in 2021. It was an old issue in Apache code that had no immediate fix when it was discovered. A ton of businesses—just about anyone using Java, which some estimates had at around 58% of all companies—were vulnerable to an exploit that would allow hackers to inject code into their systems and activate it remotely whenever they wanted. Say hello to ransomware.

This is an everyday issue that interferes with other priorities in established companies. According to a recent study of tech executives, nearly 70% of organizations’ ability to innovate is being hampered by tech debt. Ignoring legacy issues sets big firms up for disruption by more agile and innovative market entrants. It’s a truly existential threat to larger businesses.

If it ain’t broke, it will be. Tech debt crushes product teams and a firm’s ability to be innovative. Next time you think of putting off a tech debt project, don’t. Take it on today, so it doesn’t hurt your business tomorrow.

Pivoting

Ah yes, the pivot. This example is less of a cliché and more of a problematic ambiguous term. It’s not uncommon to hear a person, team, or company vaguely pivoting into or out of something.

Here’s a fun question for you: What exactly is a pivot? For some, pivots are minor changes, for others, they’re wholesale company restructuring, and for the rest, it’s a reference to Ross Geller trying to move a couch up a narrow staircase.

My take: A pivot is when you’re forced to change something material and complex to maintain or improve market viability. A pivot isn’t something you choose. It’s something that chooses you.

What does it matter? Throwing around the term “pivot” muddies raging waters. If your company is pivoting, big or small, it can have enormous effects on both the firm and potentially your employment.

Pivoting in small companies generally means searching for market viability; in its early days, PayPal pivoted its business model five times in 15 months. While the market can force small changes, pivoting as a term ought to be reserved for the coercion of your business and a base level of complexity.

Pivoting a big company has enormous consequences and the term should carry more weight. If the CEO says you’re pivoting, some folks might need to polish off their resumes. At any rate, the work you do and how you do it is probably about to change.

Don’t throw the cliché term pivot around because you had to change the food option at your employee appreciation party from pizza to sandwiches. Reserve it for the meaningful and complex coercion of your business by the market.

These are just three problematic business clichés but there are many more out there. The next time you’re in a meeting and someone says “The customer is king,” “All publicity is good publicity,” or “Nice guys finish last,” challenge them. Ask for proof. Odds are they have no idea if what they’re saying is true. Rather than steer into the unknown based on a myth, push your people to think critically. After all, “Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.”

Parts of this piece have been adapted from Startup Different: The Myth-Busting Blueprint for Your Multi-Million Dollar Business.