Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Month: January 2022

Chains
January 17, 2022

Chains

Here’s Peter Drucker talking about management chains, way back in 1954:

“Every additional level makes the attainment of common direction and mutual understanding more difficult.  Every additional level distorts objectives and misdirects attention.  Every link in the chain sets up additional stresses and creates one more source of inertia, friction and slack.    Above all, especially in the big business, every additional level adds to the difficulty of developing tomorrow’s managers, both by adding to the time it takes to come up from the bottom and by making specialists rather than managers out of the men moving up the chain.”

There’s a good chance that these observations reflect your reasons for setting up on your own – so you could focus on the customer rather than your boss(es), and so you could have complete autonomy over how you serve those customers.

But as you grow your own business from just you to more than a few, how do you stop yourself replicating the structures you found so constricting?

Simple.

Make everyone a manager – not of other people, but of the process every business runs – making and keeping promises to the people it serves:

disappearing boss course card

 

When everyone’s a boss, there’s no need for chains of any kind.

Thanks to Michele Zanini for the prompt.

Take back control
January 14, 2022

Take back control

One of the things that puts business owners off growing, is the fear of losing control.   They’ve handcrafted a customer experience that works well.  They have built up a clientele that loves what they do and the way that they do it.  They are concerned about diluting that.

The answer, as every composer knows, is to take the music that is in your head, and write it down, so that others can play it.  Put the control into a score, not a person.

That way, your customer experience lives on through others, not in spite of them.

At first, you will have to conduct this music yourself.  But after a while, your people won’t even need that.  With a good score, they can conduct themselves.

And that removes the real limit to growth – you.

Word for the year 2022
January 13, 2022

Word for the year 2022

I’m pretty rubbish at selling.  Perhaps because it feels too much like putting a part of myself out there, setting myself up for judgement.  Because many people won’t need what I do, and probably most people won’t like it.

But then I’m letting down the people who would.

An offer can only be accepted if it’s made.

So my word for 2022 is ‘Offer’.

As in: ‘Here, you might like this.  I made it for you.’

It’s called The Disappearing Boss, and it has it’s own website.

The stories we tell others
January 12, 2022

The stories we tell others

If you visit a National Trust property, every person you meet is likely to be a volunteer.   An individual providing this service in their spare time, for nothing.  Yet the experience is remarkably similar across hundreds of houses and thousands of volunteers.

How do they achieve this?  There are no scripts.  Nothing is prescribed, apart from some simple Covid-19 distancing notices.  Every volunteer performance is unique.

What every National Trust building does have is a story.  The story of the building and the people associated with it – usually the famous one who commissioned it, built it or lived in it.

Every volunteer (whether they are a room guide, a shop assistant or a gardener) is expected to know this story, to research around it and to tell it.  But they can do all of that in their own way, including details and providing context as they see fit, tailored to the visitors in front of them, in their own personal style.

The most basic ‘customer experience score’ is the story everyone can tell.  For a business it’s the story of how you make and keep your promise to the client.

What’s your story?

Can everyone in your business tell it?

How do you help new people learn it?

What is innovation for?
January 11, 2022

What is innovation for?

I’ve been through a lot of hoovers in my life, from a massive ‘wet and dry’ suitable for builders through Dyson and any number of supposedly ‘handy’ machines.  Many of which have not lasted long.

The GTech AirRam I inherited from my mum is the only one that’s made hoovering almost enjoyable, and yesterday, it looked like it was about to turn into another relic.

Fortunately, I found on the support site that I can replace virtually every part individually.

That means that unlike every other hoover I’ve owned, I can keep most of this one going indefinitely.

For a long time, hoover innovation was simply about creating new demand – ‘new’ models that superseded the old, so you had to buy all over again if you wanted the status of having the latest.

The trouble with that was that with a proliferation of models, a consumer was just as likely to buy someone else’s new model as yours.

Now it seems that innovation is about creating brand loyalty by making it easier to repair the existing.   Allowing the consumer to preserve their original investment (in my case emotional rather than financial), and send less material to landfill.

What all this tells me is that the purpose of innovation is to change behaviour.

We’re going to need a lot of that to cope with what’s coming.

Get your thinking hats on.

A Relic
January 10, 2022

A Relic

Years ago, my dad, who was an IT director for a civil engineering firm, said he liked to keep a record of everything a project had tried, even if those things had failed.

It meant that new projects could learn not just what had worked from previous ones, but also what hadn’t.

That didn’t mean all previous experiments would be rejected – after all, technology changes and things that weren’t possible before become possible now.  What it did mean was that nobody walked blindly into repeating the same mistakes.

During my January tidy-up, I found this template for drawing out consistent shapes for computer flowcharts.  A relic of a bygone era of hand-drawn flowcharts and a National Computing Centre.

I’ve never used it.  I preferred to think through my programming logic with words, and I’d never dream of using it to capture what a human should do.

I’m trying to make work more human, not less.  I want people to be making the decisions in their dealings with other people.

So I keep it.

As a reminder of what I don’t want to do.

Hello 2022!