Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Brands

Considered adoption
May 12, 2021

Considered adoption

Contrary to the popular image, the Amish are not backward-looking.  Nor are they against new technology.   What they are against is a rush to embrace the new without considering how it might impact on their ethos and their way of life.

Once they have considered, communally, they often adapt a new technology to suit their needs.   An iron or a lamp becomes battery- or propane-powered, to preserve their separateness from the outside world.  A phone and internet connection is housed in a shared booth at a walkable distance from homes, to maintain the primacy of face-to-face communication and neighbourliness.

The resulting ‘contraptions’ might look odd to us, but the approach is one worth adopting.

Before you jump on the latest bandwagon, ask yourself:

  • Does this technology support and enhance my ability to make and keep my Promise of Value?
  • If not, how could I change to make sure it does?

If the technology can’t adapt to suit you, it probably isn’t fit for your purposes.

Authenticity
May 10, 2021

Authenticity

Authenticity is a result of mastery.

Our word comes from the Greek roots ‘auto‘ – self and ‘hentes‘ – maker or doer.  For the ancient Greeks it indicated someone who had mastered their craft to the point where they could produce work from within themselves, as opposed to copying from someone else.

What’s interesting to me about this is that authenticity isn’t so much about being as doing.  We master our craft by interacting with the world, changing both sides of the equation in the process.  Eventually, other people see us as authentic because we appear to have mastered our means of expression.  Of course it never feels like that from the inside, which is why artists never give up.

You can’t be authentic, you can only do it, over and over again.  In whatever field you’ve chosen to practice your art.

That’s how you leave your mark.

Motive power
April 30, 2021

Motive power

In the old model of business, marketing was something you did last.   It answered the question “How can I sell these things I’ve made?”.

Today, to be effective, marketing comes first, because it answers the question “Who can I best serve and how?”.

In this new model of business, your Promise of Value is the engine, and the motive power is empathy.   A fuel available to everyone.

Fallibility
April 23, 2021

Fallibility

The danger of software systems is that because we talk about them as being ‘engineered’, we take them to be infallible, in a way that would be reasonable if we were talking of a bridge, or a train, or a road.

Bridges, trains and roads obey the laws of physics.

There are no such laws behind software systems, only human beings, with prejudices, pressures and sometimes perverse incentives.

We would do well to remember that, especially when the system is accusing a human of being in the wrong.

Unwritten
March 31, 2021

Unwritten

A written constitution is certainly open to interpretation (Who exactly are ‘We, the People’?  What exactly does ‘Happiness’ mean?), but it does at least provide a tangible, concrete reference point for discussion, amendment and clarification.   It is separate, both from the people who made it and the people interpreting it right now, a thing in its own right, and therefore capable of improvement.  And at all times, citizens can compare the current culture with what that culture once aspired to be, as embodied on the constitution, and decide to act.

The unwritten is protean, slippery, even more open to interpretation, even exploitation.  But what’s worse is that the culture that surrounds it can change beyond recognition without anyone really noticing.  Until suddenly, the flag we’ve grown up with comes to stand for something rather disturbing.

Brands, whether national or corporate, are tokens of an underlying culture.   If you want that culture to persist, it’s a good idea to write it down.  An an even better idea to share it with everyone.

That way everyone can hold you to account for it.

Transience for the long term
August 5, 2020

Transience for the long term

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.

Form follows Function
August 4, 2020

Form follows Function

“Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.” Steve Jobs.

That’s true of all human artefacts, including a business.

Form follows function.

Our default business form follows its historical economic function – the concentration of capital and consequently power, to the apex of a pyramid.

If we want business to do something else, we need to give it a different shape.

One option:

A business is a system for making and keeping promises

This isn’t my utopia
June 22, 2020

This isn’t my utopia

The thing I love about reading, is that I’m always finding new ways of saying things, from people who can say them much better than me.

This midsummer weekend, I finally got round to reading the Verso edition of Utopia, by Thomas More.  It was not More’s words that struck me, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s – in fact not always her words, but words she assembled, interpreted and discussed in the first of her essays included with this book: “A non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold place to be”.

“The activities of a machine are determined by its structure, but the relationship is reversed in organisms – organic structure is determined by it’s processes”*

“The societies which have best protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence.”**

“Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself.”

“Since the day of the Roman empire and the Christian church, we hardly think of a social activity except as it is coherently Organized into a definite unit definitely subdivided.   But, it must be recognized that such a tendency is not an inherent and inescapable one of all civilization.”***

I (like Le Guin) found Thomas More’s Utopia unsatisfactory.   It is founded on force and maintained through slavery.   It’s activities are determined by its structure.   It is like most utopias,“the product of ‘the euclidean mind’ (a phrase Dostoyevsky often used), which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man whatever the cost.”****

Here’s a stab at pulling this all together into something relevant for me as Gibbs & Partners:

  • Most human beings, including business owners, are simply trying to persevere in their existence.
  • Most corporates, built as machines, where structure determines process, are inimical to this.   Which is why people, when they get the chance, retire, or leave and set up their own small businesses, often with no idea of growth, simply as a means of persevering in their existence.
  • What I’m making explicit and to an extent formalising, is an alternative, organic view of a business where process (the making and keeping of promises) determines structure.   An alternative Le Guin might call yin.
  • By formalising this structure,  I’m trying to create a blueprint for documenting the ‘laws’ of a business that enables it to be both a place where people can  persevere in their own existence and a generator of the growth, innovation and profit that will create more spaces for more people to persevere in theirs.  A place where it’s possible to enjoy both freedom and happiness.
  • I’m by no means the only person I know of trying to do something like this.  I’m part of a trend, that recognises the need for humanity to make “a successful adaptation to their environment and learn to live without destroying each other.”****

As Derek Sivers puts it:

“When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws.  This is your utopia”.

Welcome to mine.

 

*Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Excerpted in Science Digest (April 1982), p. 30.

**Claude Levi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), pp. 46-47. Also included in Structural Anthropology II (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 28-30. The version here is Le Guin’s own amalgam of the two translations.

***Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 78 (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 344.

****Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)

The best thing you can do for shareholders
June 17, 2020

The best thing you can do for shareholders

These two episodes of Eric Ries’s podcast Out of the Crisis are rapidly turning into the theme for this week.  Brian Chesky just keeps coming up with gems.

Today’s is this:

“The best thing you can do for shareholders is for the public to want your company to exist.”

How many businesses, enterprises, organisations, large or small, have you supported during lockdown, because you want them to exist?

Here’s a more challenging, perhaps painful question:

How many people are supporting your business, because they want it to exist?

Whatever the answer is, the next questions to ask, are:

Why is that?

What can you do about it?

and hopefully,

How can you thank them?

PS Hofpfisterei is a bakery chain founded in 1331.

Investment
May 19, 2020

Investment

We’ve got used to thinking of investment as a purely financial thing, undertaken by shareholders in a company.   A risk taken in the hope that the return will be worth it.

We’ve also got used to the idea that capital investors are the most important investors, and that returns to them should be kept high and constant, because otherwise they’ll take their capital elsewhere.

‘Investment’ carries another meaning though – to put on clothes, especially the ceremonial clothes of office.   In other words to publicly adopt the roles and responsibilities associated with that office.

Looked at this way, there are certainly other investors in a business.  The founders, workers, suppliers, and customers who take a risk with their time, energy and belief, in the hope that the return will be worth it.   These (along with some personal capital investors to be sure), are the people who adopt the roles and responsibilities associated with it.   Who clothe themselves in its values, purpose and ways of doing things.   Who may even wear its uniform, badge, or logo publicly and with pride.

Money isn’t the only thing necessary for the long-term success of a venture.   It certainly isn’t sufficient.

What if we focused our dividends accordingly?