Time & Perspective Quote by Anita Roddick

“Business as usual” lands here as both diagnosis and indictment: Roddick is naming the default setting of corporate life as a kind of moral autopilot. The phrase is deliberately bland, the language of memos and boardrooms, which makes it perfect as a foil for what she’s selling next: “a different, smaller business movement.” She frames dissent not as a lone-hero story but as a counterculture with its own momentum, and the word “smaller” is strategic. It admits marginal status while implying purity, agility, even credibility. If the mainstream is big, loud, and compromised, the minority can be principled.

The subtext is a challenge to a common corporate alibi: that markets are value-neutral and companies can’t afford conscience. By insisting on “put[ting] idealism back on the agenda,” she treats ethics as something that was actively removed, not naïvely forgotten. “Agenda” is the key business word doing double duty - she’s not asking for personal virtue; she’s talking about governance, priorities, what gets measured and funded. Idealism becomes operational.

Context matters: Roddick built The Body Shop into a global brand while tying it to anti-animal-testing campaigns, fair trade sourcing, and human rights advocacy. In the 1990s and early 2000s, CSR was often a glossy add-on; she’s arguing for it as the point, not the PR. The intent is to reclaim capitalism’s story from inside the marketplace: profit can be a tool, but it shouldn’t be the only language a company speaks.