Money is a human construct, representing a promise to pay. That’s all. No matter what it’s made of – shells, gold, base metal, paper, bytes – as long as the promise is good the money is good.
Money doesn’t make the world go round. Promises do that.
And we can never run out of promises.
I love it when somebody else finds ways to say things better than I can. Here’s a great post from Corporate Rebels exploring how 2 very different companies found similar ways to turnaround and then grow:
3 Principles To Run A Company Sensibly
“both were motivated to adopt their unique methodologies to rescue the struggling companies they were leading. They wanted to save the jobs of people in their organizations. They thought this could be achieved by giving all an understanding of how the businesses were run—and then involve them in improving them. Their way of saving jobs became a new way to create jobs. These new jobs created new wealth. This wealth, was then shared with those who created it in the first place: all those in the company.”
In other words, they created a virtuous flywheel that didn’t depend on the bosses.
Sounds sensible to me. Flywheels get going faster when everyone pushes in the same direction.
Yesterday I started reading ‘DO/IMPROVISE’ by Robert Poynton. It starts with another of those lovely diagrams that you only have to see to be changed by:
It’s the bit in the middle that’s powerful. ‘EAO’ stands for ‘Everything’s An Offer’.
An improv term, an ‘offer’ is what a fellow actor or audience member gives you to build on as you improvise a scene or story together. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how random it is, your job is to take it and use it to build your next offer, so that everyone can keep the scene going to a satisfactory conclusion for all. None of you know what that conclusion is until you find it.
The only part of the process you control is your own ability to spot offers, see their potential and react in a way that increases that potential for someone else.
After what 2020’s thrown at us, that might just be the attitude to cultivate for 2021.
My mother, who’d been taught housework by a female version of Felix Ungar out of ‘The Odd Couple‘ (a regime that soon collapsed in the face of 7 Oscar Madison-like children), loved to collect books about ‘women’s work’. Perhaps to see how the men who usually wrote them imagined these things should be done.
Two of these books stick in my memory. One was ‘The Mechanical Baby’, a history of childcare from ancient times onwards, I don’t remember the title of the other, but it might have been simply, ‘Housework’.
The housework one sticks because in it, the author applied all sorts of efficiency measures, taken from the workplace. For example, he suggested replacing the big Spring Clean, with an Autumn Clean. After all, Summer is when we fling windows open and let in all the dust, debris and insects from the garden. It’s also when all the spiders build their cobwebs in various corners of the house, so that by September, it looks like we’ve left up last year’s fake snow from Christmas. Or is that just my house?
Anyway, I think he had a really good point, but I’d recommend both, and go for Equinoctial Cleans, one as Winter turns to Spring, and the other as Summer turns to Autumn. Spring for de-cluttering, opening up and airing everything, Autumn for cleaning down, tidying away and mending, ready for the long haul of Winter. Both are a kind of fresh start, but with a slightly different emphasis.
Of course, both can apply to business too.
What’s the plan for your business Autumn Clean?
For me, this has been a fuzzy week. I don’t know whether it’s me, the weather or the time of year. Maybe I’ve been reading too much, not moving enough, not speaking enough to other people. Whatever the reason, it’s been a scrappy week, and I apologise if you’ve been adversely affected.
Still, it’s a bank holiday weekend, and despite the fact that the days all run together, I think it is worth taking a break. Maybe even getting out somewhere to blow the cobwebs away.
But now, I’m off for a nap. Sleep, I find, is a cure for nearly everything.
See you on the other side.
Humans love mash-ups. Collisions of disparate ideas to form a new, even more interesting idea. Given the chance, we mash-up all the time – most obviously to make each other laugh.
Surprisingly often, a mash-up leads to a breakthrough, and even more often, these breakthrough mash-ups come from an outsider asking a ‘stupid question’ – “Why can’t I see the picture now Daddy?”, “Why can’t I cast iron the way I used to cast brass?“.
If you’re running a business, you want mash-ups to occur, but not at the expense of delivering on your promises. So how can you achieve a balance?
Sparked by ‘Rebel Ideas’ by Matthew Syed, recommended and kindly given to me by Nigel Whittaker.
Did you know, the word ‘Serendipity’ was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754?
The ‘Serendip’ part refers to an old name for Sri Lanka and a Persian fairy tale about 3 princes who were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”.
Lots of breakthroughs have been serendipitous – penicillin, graphene, Post-it notes, Nutella (apparently). If you go back far enough most of what we eat and drink must have been discovered serendipitously – cheese, tea, kimchi, alcohol, even cooking food at all.
Serendipity doesn’t just happen though. And of course someone has created an algorithm for it.
Serendipity is fundamentally about noticing. Mindfully observing the world and what happens in it, without a specific purpose, but open to the possibility of discovery.
Three things are key to making serendipity work:
None of these things are inherently expensive to do. They probably also make life more interesting.
Why not find a way to plan them into how you improve your process, daily, weekly or monthly?
You never know what might turn up.
For as long as there have been humans, we have wanted to have the world remember, somehow, that ‘I was here’.
It won’t.
But if we embrace our transience and instead of using our energy to hoard – stuff, money, power, love – we use it to create systems that enrich people and planet, other human beings will.
For a little while at least.
It’s hot. Too hot for me. My office is on the south side of the house, so it gets plenty of sun. And of course I’m at home, where I don’t have air conditioning.
It’s difficult to think, difficult to get down to anything, difficult to come up with ideas.
I can’t do anything to make the room cooler.
Luckily, I have at least 4 other options:
Sometimes, acknowledging what you can’t change, makes you see what you can.
Now people are talking about going ‘back to work’ (of course many have never been away), I’m going to shamelessly steal an idea, and challenge you to imagine how ‘work’ could be different from before.
Over the weekend, sit back and imagine a workplace you’d look forward to joining. A workplace you couldn’t keep away from. A workplace you’d feel totally yourself in. A workplace you’d feel fulfilled, energised, stretched by. A workplace that enabled you to reach your potential.
What would it look like? Where would it be? What would you be doing? What would others be doing? Would there be others? How would it be organised? What would it produce? Why would you be there?
Now document what you’ve imagined, in 500 – 800 words, or as a drawing, painting, audio recording, video, and send it to me at ki*****@**************rs.com
I’d love to see what you imagine, and I think it would be very interesting to share it.
Happy imaginings. I look forward to seeing them