Discipline makes Daring possible.

The lovely bones

The lovely bones

By and large, we all have the same muscles in our bodies, and our bones show both where they were attached and how strong those muscles were.

Using this information, together with a knowledge of human anatomy, people like Oscar Nilsson can reconstruct the face of a girl who died 5,000 years ago, with a remarkable degree of accuracy.

Your processes are the bones of your business.

if you build them around your business heart and soul – the promise you make to the people you serve – your people can flesh out those bones in their own way, yet still produce a recognisable likeness for your clients.

If your bones are good, your business will always look and feel good.

Process

Process

What springs to mind when I use the word ‘process’ in conversation with people is something boring and robotic – … Read More “Process”

Who’d ‘a thought it?

Who’d ‘a thought it?

“Labor can and will become its own employer through co-operative association.” — Leland Stanford.

Yes, that Stanford.

I learn something new every day.

The 80/20 rule

The 80/20 rule

Years ago, a coffee shop – an offshoot of a well-known brand – opened in the middle of my local shopping centre. It had a nice old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of a cafe from the ‘30s, with wait staff and a long bar where coffee etc. was prepared. Of course I tried it out.

It used a very clever, but simple process. You waited at the entrance. When there was a table ready, you were ushered over to it and given a copy of the menu. Someone came and took your order, taking the menu away once they had delivered it.

It worked beautifully. Nobody was seated at a dirty table and the staff could easily tell who was waiting to give or receive their order.

Except, if you wanted another coffee, or a friend joined you halfway through, there was no way to re-order, except by trying to catch someone’s eye. But they weren’t looking for you, they were looking for menus.

So either it wasn’t meant for spending much time in, or they hadn’t thought it through.

It’s a great idea to design a process for the 80% of cases. But you do need to make sure you can handle the exceptions in a way that still fulfills your promise.

Ownership

Ownership

“How do I get my people to think like an owner?”

Make them an owner.

Seeing it through

Seeing it through

Seeing a case or project through from beginning to end is very satisfying – both for the person doing it, and for the client on the other side.

But how do you achieve that when you need to be flexible in how you assign resources?

By having a clear, high-level process for handling cases, then making sure everyone knows how to run it, and that all the information needed to move that case forward is accessible to anyone who needs it at any time.

Most of the time, one person can handle the whole thing. But when that isn’t possible (due to holidays or illness, or scheduling constraints), the client needn’t feel the difference.

And you’ve just created a more empowering division of labour.

Top-down, bottom-up

Top-down, bottom-up

I get the feeling that top-down thinking is very unfashionable at the moment. It smacks too much of command-and-control, over-complicated buraeucracy, and having things ‘done to you’ instead of ‘done with you’ – or even ‘done by you’.

Bottom-up thinking is great for quick wins, incremental change and emergent consensus, but top-down can uncover opportunities for radical change that bottom-up thinking will miss, because you’re asking higher-level questions – “How should we keep our promise?”, rather than “How do we open the office?”.

And often, by answering these high-level questions, we can remove whole chunks of low-level procedure that would otherwise go unquestioned.

We shouldn’t let our thinking get trapped in our organisational structure.

Serialisation

Serialisation

Years ago, I worked with a client who wanted to streamline and automate how clients were onboarded and offboarded (if that is a word). They didn’t have much time to spend with me, so they gave me a copy of the checklist they used so I could get a handle on how it worked.

This checklist would get created whenever a new client signed up, and would travel around the client’s office from one person to the next, with each person doing, then ticking off the task they were responsible for.

If you have something like this (and it might be an electronic ‘checklist’), here’s a useful question to ask yourself:

“Does the next person really need to wait for me to complete my task before they can start theirs?”

If not, they probably shouldn’t be on the same checklist.

An eye-opener

An eye-opener

I was introduced to this book a few years ago by the people at Matte Black Systems.

It was an eye-opener.

The way we’ve always done things isn’t the only way.

Take a look.