Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Month: January 2020

Step-wise
January 17, 2020

Step-wise

Sport has long recognised ‘Muri’ – wasted effort through overburdening people, equipment or systems.    An unrelenting schedule of high-intensity training is counter-productive.     Eustress, the beneficial stress of additional effort that leads to improved performance, is more than offset by injury and exhaustion, or distress.   Athletes burn out, physically and mentally.

The answer they’ve found is simple:  build in short periods of recovery between longer periods of intensity.   That doesn’t mean the athletes do nothing, simply that they are training at a lower level that prevents distress.   These short recovery periods allow bodies and minds to recover, but are not long enough to allow a slide back to the previous performance level.

The result is a series of systematic, and predictable step-wise improvements in performance, that can be planned to coincide with major targets, such as a local, national or international competition, or the Olympics.

It seems to me that businesses could learn a lot from this approach.

Huge thanks to Matthew Cunliffe for this insight.

Share your Promise better
January 15, 2020

Share your Promise better

Pinpointing who you are for as a business makes it much easier to share your Promise effectively and efficiently.

The people you wish to serve become much easier to find when you know who exactly who they are demographically.   If you start a new bus service on a route that is not currently covered, you know exactly where to look for potential passengers.

The people you wish to serve become much easier to find if you know who they are psychographically too.   If your new bus service uses luxury coaches with attendants, snacks and entertainment, you know which subset of potential passengers you need to appeal to, and probably what you need to say.

Of course, you need to find out whether there are enough of these people to make your bus service viable before you start it.

But if you know who you’re looking for, that’s easier too.

Making better promises
January 14, 2020

Making better promises

Assuming that your Promise of Value is already in the intersection of things profitable and things useful, how do you make it better?

Here are a few ideas:

  1. Make sure you’re absolutely clear about who you are for, and who you are not for.   In psychographic terms first (how they behave, what they believe, what problems they see), then demographic.   The more specific you can make this, the better.   Why?  Because it helps you to really see, touch and actually talk to the kind of people you wish to serve.  And it helps those people to see that you are for them.
  2. Spell out what you really do for these people.   Who do you help them to become?  How do you help them transform?
  3. Surface more about how you behave as a business – your values, style, culture, ‘the way things get done around here’.  Probably the most overlooked part of your Promise, how you do what you do is as important as what.

A simple way to test the result is to try and express it in this form:

“We do X.    Y people do/achieve/become Z because we do.”

Huge thanks to the brilliant Bernadette Jiwa for this format.

Making it better
January 13, 2020

Making it better

If a business is about making and keeping promises, what does better mean?

Making more promises?  Or keeping more?

Making our promises better?  Or keeping them better?

A good place to start might be to make better promises.   After all, the set of all useful things and the set of all profitable things do not fully correspond.

Better starts with finding our place in the intersection.

Recognition
January 10, 2020

Recognition

Occasionally, Keith Brymer Jones, a judge on ‘The Great Pottery Throwdown’ will shed a tear over someone’s work.   Making Keith cry is to aspiring potters

To err is human
January 9, 2020

To err is human

We all make mistakes.   We misjudge, we make assumptions based on prejudice and false knowledge.  We mis-time, we say the wrong thing, the wrong way.   We forget the right things, remember the wrong things.

We are after all human animals, driven by hormones, emotion and primitive responses.

We are complex evolving systems, living inside complex evolving systems.  There are bound to be mismatches.  And mismatches are one way we learn to evolve further.

So mistakes are bound to happen.   You can prevent many of them through process and a ‘golden rule’ that allows anyone to deal with unforeseen scenarios in line with your Promise, but you won’t prevent all of them.

Whether you like it or not, the way you deal with mistakes is part of your Promise.  But there is a way to make errors work for you and actually strengthen your Promise.

Be human.

Gimmicks
January 8, 2020

Gimmicks

“A gimmick is a novel device or idea designed primarily to attract attention or increase appeal, often with little intrinsic value.  When applied to retail marketing, it is a unique or quirky feature designed to make a product or service “stand out” from its competitors.”

It’s a great idea to aim to delight your clients by giving them more than they paid for.

But it takes careful thought to come up with the right kind of ‘extra’, because unless it is consistent with – comes from your Promise of Value, it will feel like a gimmick – a trick.

And appearing to be insincere is the last thing you want if you’re trying to keep your Promise and your customer.

Generosity
January 7, 2020

Generosity

On Tuesday, I found out from my dentist that it’s likely to be a fortnight before I get even a temporary fix for my missing front tooth.  “I’ll try and speed things up though, so ring tomorrow and see what date I’ve been given by the lab.”

I rang.   There was no news yet.  I was expecting to be told to call back, but instead the receptionist said: “I’ll check the lab again on Monday, they should have a date then.  Then I’ll call you to get you booked in as soon as you can.”

It doesn’t take much to engender loyalty in your clients.  Make a promise, then generously exceed it.

Generosity isn’t expensive, mostly, it’s just remembering to be human.

Gifts
January 6, 2020

Gifts

What’s your gift?  The thing you can do better than anyone else.  The thing you can’t help but do, even though it’s not what you get paid for?

Perhaps you feel guilty about wanting to be paid for using your gift on behalf of others.  Perhaps the people you’ve met so far don’t value it, so you assume nobody will.

It seems to me that for the moment at least, life is about finding a balance between exercising ones talents, and making enough money to live on, and there are at least two ways to achieve this.

  1. You can earn money in a field that doesn’t involve your gift, and exercise your gift outside it, when and where you can.
  2. You can invest time thinking about what your gift really is, who lacks it, and who needs it most right now – to the extent that they will be more than happy to pay you for it.

Option 2 is always worth trying, because the worst that can happen is that you’re back to option 1, but the potential upside is that you get paid handsomely by people who appreciate your gift – perhaps even handsomely enough that you can give some of it away to those less fortunate.

Leverage doesn’t have to be selfish.

 

Thanks to the cool women at this morning’s Like Hearted Leaders for prompting this thought.