October 31, 2023
You are a manifestation of your habits
“You are a manifestation of your habits.” That’s what the physiotherapist told me yesterday. And my habits are not good. … Read More “You are a manifestation of your habits”
Month: October 2023
October 30, 2023
Performance management
Imagine what attending a concert would look like if the orchestra’s performance was managed as if it were a pin … Read More “Performance management”
October 25, 2023
Where does leadership sit?
Here’s an interesting debate on leadership and where it fits, kicked off by Michele Zanini. Not just in the article he refers to, but the comments also.
Everyone can be a leader. Most people are already leaders, somewhere in their lives. Just not at work.
But with all the crises we face, don’t we need as big a team as possible of “everyone in the organization who can make amazing things happen”?
Where does leadership sit in your business?
Where could it sit, if you enabled it?
Discipline makes Daring possible.
October 24, 2023
Shopping around
Marketing a ‘brand’ is all about getting customers to stop looking elsewhere. To shrink each individual’s market down to a single option.
Once a customer trusts what the name stands for, the Promise it makes, that brand becomes their go-to purchase, saving them the time and effort of shopping around.
The temptation for the brand is to take that trust for granted, and chip away at the Promise that’s actually delivered, hoping that the customer won’t notice.
Properly functioning markets are better for customers, better for innovation, better for small players.
It’s part of our duty as good consumers to keep them functioning well.
That means shopping around.
Try it.
You might be surprised by what you find. You might find you’re being taken for granted. You might find a much better value option where you least expected it. The least that will happen is that your favourite brands are kept on their toes.
Discipline makes markets possible.
October 23, 2023
Standard Operating Procedures
I don’t know about you, but that phrase “Standard Operating Procedures” makes me cringe. I completely get why they are needed in certain contexts – manufacturing, engineering, military, – anything where you’re dealing with things, or beings that you treat as things.
But as soon as human beings become part of the equation, there can be no such thing as standard – from either side of the operation.
If you’re a business that focuses on delivering a service to humans, by humans, consistency is what you want, not the uniformity of standardisation. However your service is being delivered, and whoever is delivering it, it should feel consistent with your Promise of Value. Since humans are involved, that inevitably means variation – of the kind that standardisation stifles. The kind that allows your people to over-deliver on your Promise and delight individual clients – even when things go wrong.
So, as you design and document the services that enable your business to deliver though others, remember to empower that ability to vary in your team.
Not only will it make for more delight and flexibility, it will be the means by which you discover new needs and desires in your client base.
In manufacturing and engineering, variation is deviation. But for humans and other living beings, and the businesses that serve them, it truly is the spice of life.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
October 20, 2023
From dictatorship to democracy in a single generation
In business, our view of succession is not unlike that of royals. An heir apparent is selected, carefully trained, and groomed to take the helm when we leave.
This approach is fraught with difficulties.
First, as regnant monarch, we put off the selection, training and all that, because we’d rather not face our own mortality, and because to do all that takes time out from running the business.
Next, the heir we select may not wish to be chosen – even if they are family. They may not wish to shoulder the risk of destroying their inheritance. They may have other ideas on what to do with their life.
The people we’ve overlooked may resent that, and start to at least detach themselves from the business, or undermine it, or worse decide to fight over it.
Finally, there may not be an obvious heir.
There is a more rational, modern approach.
- Build your business around a clearly defined customer experience (an OurScore ), that gives people the confidence to know what they are doing without constraining their personality and individuality.
- Give people clear roles to play. Put all the resources they need to play them well at their fingertips. Including the feedback that will enable them to improve both the customer experience and their own ability to deliver it.
- Train them to perform more than one role, so they can have variety of work, you have redundancy in the system and the customer learns that they can happily deal with anyone in the business.
Built this way, a business more or less runs itself.
It gives you far more options for succession, because anyone who works in it can be your heir, if they want.
Or everyone.
A transition from dictatorship to democracy in a single generation.
That would be a legacy to be really proud of.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
October 18, 2023
A reminder
Why should I write down my Customer Experience Score, when I have good people working for me, who can work things out for themselves?
Because making good people reinvent your wheel over and over again is a shocking waste of humanity.
Humanity that could be set free to invent even better wheels, and even more exciting uses for them.
Discipline makes Daring possible
October 17, 2023
Managing without managers
I found this excellent article by Michele Zanini yesterday: ‘Can we manage without managers?’.
It’s well worth a read, but here are the phrases that jumped out for me:
“vanguard organisations … don’t get rid of management as a set of activities (e.g., planning, allocating, reviewing)–but they syndicate it to the broader organization. “
“By giving people the ability to gain influence (and compensation) based on accomplishment as opposed to advancement, an organization ends up with more, not fewer leaders.“
Because actually, we want leadership without managers.
One of the objections often raised to a no-manager organisation is “If you remove layers, you’ll end up ovewhelming people at the top“. Overwhelm at the top is a common experience for growing micros.
What this article shows is that there are other, far better ways of dealing with that than adding managers. Writing down the music in your head, so that others can play it is one of them.
Why not start as you mean to grow on and make everyone a leader?
October 16, 2023
Taking ownership
One day, the child in this photograph might expect to inherit her parents’ motorbike.
She couldn’t expect to use it until she’d learned to drive it safely, keep it in good order and register it with the appropriate authorities. If that seems like too much trouble, she might very well sell it, run it into the ground, or simply leave it to rust.
Handing over your business to your employees (or your children for that matter) isn’t enough to ensure that it will thrive afterwards. Transferring ownership transfers power, but not the ability to use that power responsibly.
Of course your people might have that ability already, but if you’re the boss of a 5 or 10 person business, it’s unlikely that you or they know that conclusively.
After the sale is almost too late to find that out. You’re not the boss any more.
So, if you’re planning to go employee-owned, or to pass your business on to your children, make sure they know how to run it before they take ownership.
- Spell out your Promise of Value, so everyone know exactly who the business serves and what it really does for them.
- Document your desired customer experience with an OurScore , so everyone can see the context of the business as a whole.
- Let people learn and play multiple parts of that score, so they feel how it all fits together.
- Give them responsibility for living up to the Promise in all the parts they play, and the autonomy to interpret it, to enhance the audience experience.
- Automate admin and the collection of feedback from each performance.
- Get everyone used to regular practice at using that feedback to improve both the OurScore and their own playing skills.
This takes effort, but not as much as you might think. Like most things, the sooner you start, the better. But you could do it while the legalities of transfer are being worked out, or even include it as part of the transfer process.
The upside is you’ll have something even more worth handing over, and for all the new bosses, the ability to truly cherish it as your legacy.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
October 12, 2023
Grrrr….
One of the things I really dislike about Microsoft Windows is the way updates barge in and trample all over my setup, like the wombat in the comparethemarket commercial. The convenience of auto-updates is more than offset by the work I have to put into getting everything back in order.
Why can’t there be a protocol for signifying which apps are critical so that any incoming update or install can avoid overwriting their registry details?
I appreciate that I may be asking the impossible, but if nobody asks, nothing will change.
So why not me?
