Techology isn’t just the hard stuff we see all around us – the telly, the washing machine, the mobile phone. It isn’t even just all the invisible stuff behind these bits of kit – the cabling, the servers, or the intangible stuff behind all that – the network protocols, the software, the AI, the collections of data.

Technology is also the way we think about ourselves as a society, and the way we organise society in line with that thinking – what a ‘family’ is, what management is, our laws and institutions, our forms of government.

The reason I don’t work with corporates is not because they don’t need what I do. It’s because corporates are a key part of our currently dominant technology, that dictates the accumulation of ever-increasing profit at all costs. They still use a management technology that sprang from plantation slavery. There’s no way I want to make that technology more efficient or effective.

Instead I choose to work with small business owners. Who run what you might call artisan businesses. Not because they make artisan things, but because they bring an artisan mindset to their business.

A sense of pride in what they do, care in how they do it, and a feeling of being embedded in their local community. Of course, they need to make a profit, but they refuse to do it by exploiting their team, the suppliers, their customers or their local environment. And their need for profit isn’t infinite. A good living is all they want before they start giving back.

There is no reason at all why these business should ever become corporates, but it seems to me that if they could get to be just a little bigger, and last even a little longer than the people who founded them, they can offer an alternative, more attractive technology to future generations.

A technology based on joyful, meaningful, creative, collaborative and actually useful work, done by humans, with humans, for other humans and for the planet.

This is why I created my technology – The Disappearing Boss technology – a model, methodology and software tools – to enable artisan-minded businesses to thrive and grow without losing their soul. To create an alternative business technology that’s part of a larger ecology of freedom.

A technology ready to be picked up when the dominant one finally crashes and burns.

Discipline makes daring possible.