Here’s a good question from Alan Wick:
“What do you want your business to be known for?“
It’s a hard one to answer, because there’s a second unspoken part to it:
“That nobody else is known for?“
To put you in a category of 1.
Being ‘all of yourself, to everyone, all of the time‘ is what we might call being our ‘best selves’, our ‘whole selves’.
If you want your people to bring that ‘whole self’ to work, you have to make sure the work feeds it properly:
If you only use half the person, you’ll only get half the job.
In other words, the work needs to empower them to be fully human.
The investment pays off. Handsomely.
If you need to have a job in order to live (and most of us do), then work all too easily becomes a series of power plays, tests of will between worker and supervisor, supervisor and manager, manager and director. Between subordinate and superior.
Power plays that can get nasty, because there is no way out, no safe word you can say to signal ‘Stop, I’ve had enough‘.
When everyone but the person at the top feels too afraid to disobey, and is unable to walk away in protest, what cascades down is unfreedom. Or as we might have called it in earlier times, slavery.
How much worse then, if it turns out that what you are in thrall to isn’t even human, but AI. Statistics generating targets that take no account of actual conditions on the ground – a pandemic, a storm, a tornado – with no possibility of being overidden by an intelligent human.
As a result 6 people died in this Amazon warehouse, picking stuff people don’t need, made using resources that could be better used elsewhere (or not used at all) to make money Bezos doesn’t know what to do with.
Work should not be this way, need not be this way.
Stop. I’ve had enough.
And I know where and how to change it.
As usual ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ will be on TV this Christmas. I’ll be watching it, again.
And noting, again, that nothing that makes the protagonist’s life worth living has anything to do with scented candles, Amazon orders, or objects of any kind.
Of course not. We are not what we own, but who we know. We are the sum and product of our connections with others.
Which makes me even angrier that more than a dozen people died last weekend in Kentucky because a manufacturing or fulfillment target counted for more.
This isn’t ‘legendary customer service’ – I don’t believe any customer would value on-time delivery of their order over the life of the person making or packing it.
In fact it shows that the customer isn’t really important either. It would have been so easy to let people know ‘We’re sorry, but a storm is on it’s way, and we daren’t risk our people’s lives. We’ll make arrangements to get your goods to you another way, but they may be later than you expected’.
As you know, I believe a business should be built around making and keeping promises to its customers and clients, but when you can’t, or shouldn’t, due to forces outside your control, say so and do the right thing. The people you serve will love you more for it, not less.
Growing a culture is easy. You just leave an agar dish open to the air. The culture you get is a matter of what falls into your dish.
For a business, it’s the same. As soon as you add people to your business, you get a culture. As new people join, they pick up the norms, the narratives, and the identities of the people already there. The result of whatever’s fallen into your dish.
But with a framework that attracts the right things into your dish, that’s easy to grow on and around, it’s possible to grow a culture you’ve designed rather than one that happens by chance. Even if you’ve already got the wrong culture already in place.
What would your business culture look like if you designed it?
Transactions are meant to be purely functional and impersonal. We don’t have to worry about how the person on the other side feels – or even whether they are a person. They don’t have to worry about us either. We both do our business and move on.
All very convenient, but not terribly satisfying.
We humans crave connection and recognition. We love to be seen by others, and we know that the only way to be seen is to see. We’re constantly trying to turn transactions into relationships, however brief (did you speak to the person who gave you your COVID-19 vaccine? I expect so), and especially around the things we value.
I’m happy to pay my car tax through a faceless, characterless portal and my council tax via direct debit, but I prefer to buy my groceries in person, having a chat at the checkout as I do. I buy my books online, from a small independent bookshop. We are both very aware that there are people on the other side of the transaction, and often go out of our way to remind ourselves of that.
Transactions are exchanges that take place between strangers. Or between people who want to treat each other as if they are strangers.
The danger is that by treating each other as strangers, we become strangers. Blind to the needs of others. Blind even to our own need to be valued as a human being. Sublimating that need into a desire for things, or even selling our data in return for a taste of it.
We can’t escape transactions. Our society is increasingly built around them. But as businesses, we can do our best to deliver the relationships our clients really want.
On top of the transaction, as a bonus.
As a gift.
Letting ‘art’ into a business feels wrong somehow. Surely the point of business is predictability, conformity, delivering to specification? How can you let people ‘do art’ on this without losing these things?
The kind of precision we usually think of when we think about ‘predictability, conformity, delivering to specification’, is really only necessary for manufacturing. Even then, the manufacturing part is only a fraction of what makes up the customer experience.
If art happens in that tense space between rules and license, restriction and freedom, certainty and uncertainty, you can at least control what happens on one side of the space. You can specify ‘the least we should do’, with as much precision as you like. That means there is no downside to the art that can take place, only upside. You can predict that specification will be met at least, perhaps exceeded.
The output of artists constantly evolves, as they explore that space of tension between the rules they’ve set themselves and whatever it is that they wish to express. Each individual work is a specific response to that tension, different from every other, but taken together, the whole body of work is coherent. You can tell it’s all from the same artist.
The thing your business exists to express is your Promise of Value. Everyone in the business is trying to create art in the tense space between your Promise of Value and the floor you’ve defined. Each individual making and keeping of your Promise – or customer experience – is a specific response to that tension, different from each other, but coherent, taken as a whole. You can tell they’re all from the same studio. You can predict that every response will conform to your Promise of Value.
Looked at this way, your job as business owner is not to control individual output, but to define the space – the studio if you like – where your people, your artists, can create output that delights the people you serve.
Why would you do this? Because art commands higher prices than factory-made. People value human.
What do we mean when we call something ‘a commodity’?
It means its substitutable, interchangeable, you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.
It means we don’t have to think about it. It’s just there. To hand when we need it, otherwise invisible.
I no longer use ‘commodity olive oil’. Mine comes from Marije in Portugal. I’ve seen her family harvesting the olives. I’ve seen the designs for the special ceramic bottles it can come in. I’ve seen the ship ‘Gallant’ sailing to pick her oil up, and sailing back to Penzance to drop it off. I know the names of many of the people involved in making that happen.
And every time I use my oil, which is every day, I think of them and all the work that’s gone into getting olive oil to my table. I feel connected to a network.
My olive oil is not a commodity, I pay well above average price for it, and it’s worth every penny.
Commodification is not inevitable. We can choose to be different, as buyers, producers and middle-men.
As a community.
I used to wonder how potters could charge so much for their pots, until I took up pottery.
Then I saw how much work went into producing a pot fit to sell. Not just the work of potting, but also how many pots get thrown away because they broke or cracked in the kiln, or because the glaze didn’t work. Or even because the idea itself just wasn’t good enough. I wondered then how they could charge so little.
A brilliant way to help your prospects and clients understand the value you bring is to show your work. To share the process by which you create that value.
It’s easier when that process is clearly, genuinely focused on them.
When Adam Smith wrote “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”, he wasn’t thinking of JBS S.A, or Anheuser-Busch InBev, or Grupo Bimbo, S.A.B. de C.V..
He was thinking of Mr Jameson, Mr Paterson and Mr McDermid – people his mother knew and spoke to regularly, trying to make a decent living. Who knew that if they tried to short-change customers or cheat their suppliers they’d be found out, word would spread and business would be lost.
But as Adam Smith also wrote “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.“
There’s a reason marketeers talk about ‘brands’. Brands aren’t people, or even companies, they’re more often monopolies masquerading as humans.
As consumers (and human beings) we should at least keep ourselves aware of that.
The invisible hand can’t work without a market.
