Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Book Recommendations

A three-booker
March 16, 2022

A three-booker

This weekend was a 3-booker.

I learned some things:

  1. I don’t know enough about feminism.
  2. Remember those tabloid headlines from the ’70’s, screaming about GLC money being wasted on ‘one-legged, black, lesbian, women’s groups’?   What they were actually objecting to was probably a co-operative of female architects collaborating with the mostly female clients of a new GLC funded community centre to design how it should work.  ‘Making Space‘ is an interesting set of essays from that time that may well revise your memories.
  3. The system isn’t what I thought it was.  It turns out capitalism has been hijacked.   Read ‘Kleptopia’ while you can.  It’s scary, but a lot of things make sense afterwards.

Outsourcing Work
March 2, 2022

Outsourcing Work

I’ve had a lot of work on this last couple of weeks.   A fair chunk of it as a customer.

My bank is asking me to re-give them some information they have had for at least 11 years;  my pension manager has asked me to give them information about dependents – but won’t use that information to update anything they already have, so now I have call them to check that myself;  I’ve had to chase to get a replacement pair of boots delivered and I’ve had to walk my own ‘last mile’ to pick up a parcel that got to my doorstep, but not beyond.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with do-it-yourself – where that makes my life easier.

We humans want agency.  We want to do things for ourselves.   What we don’t want is to get tangled up in the inefficient bureaucracy and busy-work that is clearly going in inside these major organisations.   Bureaucracy that’s happening because they’ve forgotten who they really serve.   The customer.

Do your own job guys, that’s what I pay you for.

 

 

PS If you want to know more about bureaucracy in modern times, read this book.   Watch the author’s summary here.

Slow reading
January 21, 2022

Slow reading

I read a lot, and I read fast.   But sometimes it’s nice to ‘slow down’, by reading something longer – a sequence of books that encompass individual stories as part of a larger whole.

It could be non-fiction, like Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of’ series, or crime fiction such as the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, or Reginald Hill’s Dalziel & Pascoe novels.  Or it could even be children’s fiction, like Harry Potter or this series from Susan Cooper.

Whatever it is, there’s something very satisfying about working through individual books, adding to the bigger picture as you go, seeing the main characters grow, enjoying the references back to earlier stories or characters, or seeing the same story told from a different perspective, or simply noticing how the author’s writing style develops.   It feels more rounded, more rich, more true to life than a simple jog from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happy ever after’.

Perhaps I enjoy them because in these works the authors create an entire tapestry, not just a single thread.  An ecosystem, rather than a single process.  An ecosystem that can generate many different stories, not just the ones that happen to have been told.

There’s nothing wrong with telling a simple tale, or with building an ecosystem.    You just need to know which one you’re aiming for.

Much like a business then.

Bullshit Jobs
December 16, 2021

Bullshit Jobs

This week, I’ve mostly been re-reading this book by David Graeber, published what seems like a lifetime ago in 2018.

In 2015, YouGov published a poll, showing that when asked whether their job “makes a meaningful contribution to the world?” 37% of respondents said ‘no’, and 13% of people said they didn’t know.  That’s a terrible waste of human potential.

Until recently many of those 37% or 13% will have been furloughed, while many of the other 50% weren’t – their jobs (care workers, nurses, shop workers, bus-drivers etc) were simply too ‘key’ to allow that, or they were self-employed.

I wonder whether furlough gave some of the 37% time to re-think what they wanted from work?   Is that what’s behind ‘The Great Resignation”?

What seems to be fairly clear from my re-reading of this book, is where most of those ‘bullshit jobs’ are.   They’re in corporates, or privatised government agencies.

Where they aren’t is in small businesses.

One more reason why I believe bigger small businesses are the future.

Nonsense
December 13, 2021

Nonsense

A long weekend of reading.   Sometimes I like to give my heart and brain a rest with some light, frothy fiction I’ve read many times before.

Or, if I’m honest, some dark and murderous fiction, from someone like Jo Nesbo.

You can’t be thinking all the time, and these are great ways to switch your brain off before bed.

What’s your preferred ‘nonsense’ for giving yourself a break?

 

 

PS If you’re looking for something inspirational and non-frothy, I recommend ‘The Daughters of Kobani’.  A true story you’re unlikely to hear anywhere else.

The world turned upside down
November 18, 2021

The world turned upside down

Until a couple of years ago, I throught cleaning your teeth was about cleaning your teeth.

It turns out I was wrong.  It’s about cleaning your gumline.  Because it’s not so much about getting rid of food debris, as cleaning up after the bacteria that live in your mouth.  Who breed and create debris (plaque) whether you eat or not.

There are lots of things we think we know, that actually turn out to be wrong, or at least capable of alternative interpretations.   The more alternatives we see, the more we can imagine even better ones.

If you’re up for it, here are a few of the books that have turned my world of ideas upside down:

Of course, every book does this to some extent – even the ones you’ve read before, because you can’t step into the same river twice.

Which books would you recommend?

Seeing straight
November 10, 2021

Seeing straight

I’m lucky, my eyesight has always been good.  Apart from one little thing.  I don’t always see straight.

Sometimes, I reach for a book on the bookshelf, and come back with the one that was next to it.  I’ve got used to this, so now I purposely reach for the book next to the one I really want.  It works every time.

You don’t need dodgy eyes to take advantage of this simple technique.   As John Kay writes in ‘Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly‘ aiming for something next to the thing we want is actually the best way to get the thing we want.

What do you really want for your business?  What could you focus on that might actually deliver it?

Sharing the work
October 5, 2021

Sharing the work

George Stephenson built his steam engines without drawings.  He didn’t need them.  As both designer and maker, he could keep everything in his head, using rules of thumb, jigs and tools to speed up the making.   Every engine was hand-crafted and unique.

His son, Robert Stephenson, set up the first railway drawing office.  He separated production from design so that both activities could be scaled.  The drawings communicate the design to the people who build.

When we first set up in business, we behave like George Stephenson.  We hand-craft each and every user experience.  We learn from each iteration what customers really want.

And when we scale, we expect our team to be able to use the rules of thumb, jigs and tools we created along the way.  We assume that they have in their heads what we have in ours.   So we get frustrated that they don’t do things ‘the way they should be done.‘

That’s unfair.   They don’t know what we know, haven’t learned what we learned, didn’t design the jig, tools and rules of thumb we expect them to use, don’t know to get the most from them.

We forget to give them the equivalent of drawings – our design for a customer experience, on paper, for them to deliver.

The good news is that most of us aren’t generating thousands of designs, but a few.   Even better, because we’re dealing with human interactions, a certain amount of sketchiness makes things more effective, not less.   The best news is that once our initial designs are out there, everyone in the business can improve on them.

Before you share the work, share the design behind it.

P.S. I thoroughly recommend the book this picture came from.

Supply chains
October 4, 2021

Supply chains

Do you remember the last CAPTCHA you filled in?  The one that asked you to click every square that had bicycles in?   How long did it take you? A few seconds? A minute?

Of course, you know that every time you do that you’re cleaning data for an AI project, or training an AI machine to get better at bicycle recognition.

To you, that piece of microwork was a distraction.  To others it’s a project.  A minute’s worth of work for an unknown customer with an unknown purpose, often far less innocuous than bicycles, paid for in cents.

These ‘projects’ are not even tasks, only tiny slices of a task.  Like the complex calculations performed by the Lyons Corner House ‘computers’, only without the employment contract, the shared office or the necessary equipment.  Without even knowing who or where the ‘computer’ before you is, nor the one after you, because actually you’re spread across continents and time-zones, in refugee camps, prisons and slums.

Now imagine trying to build any kind of working life around ‘projects’ like these.

If you thought bodged-up fire-trap factories in Bangladesh was bad, welcome to the supply chain for the software behind driverless cars, voice-assistants, smart bikes and fitness-trackers.  The supply chain of the future.  Unless we’re careful.

I recommend this book.  It’s not comfortable reading, but I think it is essential.

Why I read fiction
September 16, 2021

Why I read fiction

“The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.” George Eliot.

Middlemarch is my favourite work of fiction precisely because George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) succeeds so well in this endeavour.

Not everyone in the book is good, or beautiful, or admirable or likeable, but by the end you feel they are all worthy of the investment of your attention.  Even the ‘villains’.   You may not approve of everything they do, but you at least understand how they got there.  Not through being ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but through being human, by the choices they take at each little fork in the road, how they justify those choices to themselves and how that leads to the route taken at the next fork, and the next.

Reading fiction is one of the most effective ways I know to expand my horizons.  I’ve ‘met’ far more people through fiction than I could ever hope to meet in the flesh, from all sorts of backgrounds, times and places.  Practising empathy for these characters, written by and about people outside my comfort zone is great practice towards doing it for real.

I know quite a few businesses who keep a library of business books for their team.   Perhaps its time to add some fiction.