March 2019 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 29, 2019

Go Blunt

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I had clothes to wash. I was in Brussels, and the place I was staying had no washing machine, so I headed off for the nearest launderette.

What’s stuck in my mind all these years later is the instructions on the washing machine. On one side of the door they were in French, on the other, Flemish.

The French instructions took up 4 times the space, and talked about “making coins to be introduced into” the machine.

The Flemish on the other hand was blunt – “stick your penny in the slot”.

The point of this story? If you are struggling to explain what your promise is, try blunt.

March 28, 2019

Leverage

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth”.

We tend to focus on the lever, but the ‘place to stand’ is just as important.

Without sure footing, the lever can’t get purchase.

When you know the essentials are being done consistently, you can experiment at the edges to make things better.

Discipline makes daring possible.

March 27, 2019

Constraints

No composer would present his orchestra with a blank scoresheet and expect them to play – not even John Cage.*

Creativity requires constraints. The blank sheet of paper numbs imagination.

“Thinking outside the box”
“Pushing the envelope”
“Pushing boundaries”
“Bending/stretching/breaking/re-writing the rules”

If you want the creativity, you have to create constraints people can work from.

Discipline makes daring possible.

*Cage’s box was for the audience, not the orchestra.

March 26, 2019

Exclusivity

Not everyone wants what you could do for them.

Not everyone who wants what you could do for them, wants the way you do it.

Not everyone who is willing to work for or with you wants to do things ‘the way we do them round here’.

Not everyone who could buy into your franchise wants to follow your system.

But for the ones who do, you are the answer to their prayers, and they’ll tell their friends.

They are why you do what you do, the way you do it.

Find them. Help them find you.

March 25, 2019

When you add a manager to a business, you add overhead. So the first effect of hiring someone to replace yourself as manager or supervisor – so you can work on your business instead of in it – is to take a real hit in profitability.

What if, instead of appointing someone new to manage your people, you appointed them to manage themselves? You could use the saving in overhead to invest in them instead, building a supporting framework, coaching, mentoring, training, and of course a fair share of the rewards.

When you want to expand to serve more customers or clients, you can simply add more people.

Those who’ve taken this approach have found the return on this kind of investment to be well worth it.

March 22, 2019

Utopia revisited

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia in it is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a fairer country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

I don’t think we appreciate Oscar’s genius nearly as much is it deserves.

This is my 100th blog. Thank you.

March 21, 2019

Rules

It’s often said that Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. That’s true. But what’s the strategy for maintaining Culture?

Here’s mine:

An explicit Promise of Value: principles, behaviours, values, purpose, “the way we do the thing we’re here to do”.
Customer-focused Roles: the parts played in delivering the Promise, “how what we’re doing now relates to our customer”
A floor: the lower bound of what’s acceptable, “the least we should do”.
Process: what has to happen in order to deliver the outcomes that share and keep our Promise, “our score”.

The autonomous enterprise doesn’t need a ruler, but it does need rules.

March 20, 2019

Manège

According to my Chambers dictionary, this is the probable origin of the word ‘Manage’, deriving from the 16th century Italian ‘Maneggio’.

It’s a lovely word, unless perhaps you’re the horse.

The other interesting thing I learned this morning is that the space where you get a horse to walk/trot/run in circles around you is called a ‘carrousel’.

March 19, 2019

Control Freaks

Control freaks get a bad rap.

In my experience, business owners become control freaks because they care about the experience their customers are getting.

They want every client to feel as if they were dealing with the owner personally, as they did back in the days when the business was the business owner.

Control freaks want to delegate. They just don’t feel they can.

They don’t know that their people can deliver that customer experience just as well as they can, if not better – even if they don’t do it in quite the same way. They’ve never discovered this, because they’ve never tried to articulate exactly what that customer experience should be. They just do it, and they expect their team to be able to just do it too.

If you want your business to run autonomously, without you, and still deliver on your original promise to customers and clients, then you need to build autonomy into your business.

It rarely happens by osmosis.

March 18, 2019

An impossible choice

Your business eats you up. It takes all your energy and focus, you worry about it even when you’re not there, so you might as well stay there, making sure its working as it should day-in, day-out. But oh, sometimes, you’d love to just walk away.

Your business is your creation. You imagined it into being, worked hard to get it to where it is. You want it to be a reflection of your values and beliefs, you want it to be bigger and better. Some time, you’d love it to be your legacy.

It seems like an impossible choice – between your business or your life.

But it is also possible to have a business that represents you, without you having to be there, so you and everyone else in your business can enjoy life more.

In the autonomous enterprise, discipline makes daring possible.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings on people, process and responsible autonomy for small-business employers.

Month: March 2019