At an individual level, business is the activity one undertakes, of trying to manipulate social credits in bank accounts and the like, so that a sufficient excess can be retained to ensure that some can be exchanged for food. Someone else will tend your garden, grow your vegetables, make your cheese, kill the animal you want to casserole, and ferment the wine you need to celebrate your success.

At a corporate level, business is an organized response to a real or imaginary social need, whereby the needy support the greedy by gratefully rewarding the providers with credits in excess of the intrinsic value of the solution. In some circumstances the needy are so generously grateful, that as well as providing for all the bodily comforts of the executive board of control, the substantial credits accumulated often enable one or more of the board to have salary pyramids of self-esteem constructed and personally fitted to accommodate the shape and size of their arse.

Whereas in most competitive activities, winning by adhering to the rules is where the prestige and merit accrues, business is a game where much stature is acquired by the skill exhibited in being successful in ignoring, avoiding or altering the rules. Rather than defining the nature of the game, the rules of business are seen rather as a stimulus to exploring diverse ingenuities of circumvention. Certainly, much business activity is simply a pragmatic, predominantly urban survival activity. Educational attitudes however, as well as advertising and media promotions have succeeded in obtaining a general acceptance that financial rewards and accolades of success can be basically unlimited. Social standing tends to be measured as much by the size of the pile salted away as by the displacement of the golden balloons used to export the funds out of the site into less exploited and more desirable environs.