I realise I forgot to mention the book pictured in my earlier blog this week.
It’s well worth a read, sadly only available on Amazon.
Here’s my takeaway from reading it:
Sustainable improvement only came when the owners, Julian and Andrew did three things:
- They re-framed what a business is about: “A business exists to form contracts, and satisfy them successfully.” In other words, it’s about making promises and keeping them.
- They re-designed the highest level business processes around that definition to create a framework. In other words, they created a score for people to follow, without telling them where to put their fingers.
- They handed over all the work that takes place within that framework to each and every person in the business, along with the lion’s share of the rewards. Each person became in effect a virtual business running the entire end-to-end process of forming contracts and satisfying them successfully, and collaborating with peers to do so. In other words, they enabled people to fulfill all their human needs for purpose, mastery, agency, autonomy and community, not just their basic need to ‘make a living’.
As a result, the business became not just self-managing, but self-leading. In other words, they built a scalable, replicable system for making and keeping promises, that didn’t need them to be there.
If a manufacturing business can do this, then so can you.
And I’d love to help.
