Discipline makes Daring possible.

Three strangers walked into a bar

Three strangers walked into a bar

On Friday I went to a meetup with total strangers.

Even though we had never met each other before, online or off, I knew it was worth the risk, because we are all alumni of at least one Seth Godin course, and I knew that would mean attendees would be curious about others, open to sharing ideas and information, willing to help each other and have a very interesting story behind them.

I was right.   We left the bar feeling like friends.  We took selfies, swapped podcasts and arranged to do it again for Christmas, and encourage others to come along too.

All we had in common was that we are customers of a particular brand, living in a particular location.

Can your brand do this?

The beauty parade

The beauty parade

The problem with forcing yourself to conform to a particular ideal of ‘beauty’, as an individual or a business, is that over time and space, what constitutes that ideal changes.  Plus of course it is an ideal, never actually seen in nature.

Of course this is the point.  No one can possibly keep up, but they will spend time, money and energy trying.  Time, money and energy that could be spent on things that are more dangerous for the status quo.

Yet, as humans, we find beauty in the things we love.  Whatever the beloved looks like, becomes by definition, beautiful.

That means there’s no need to define yourself by another’s standard.   Live up to your own.

The right people will see your beauty.

Fluff

Fluff

A metaphor for the relationship your business creates with its clients could be seen as fluff.   A nice marketing touch.  Something to hang a campaign on, to help people choose you over others.

But it can and should go much deeper than that.

Blue Rocket Accounting used their metaphor (“we are Mission Control to your space mission”) to standardise their services, to define the Roles people working in the business play for clients and to design how they deliver on that promise.  The metaphor becomes shorthand for the purpose – ‘what we do for the people we serve’.

That’s not fluff.  That’s the foundation.

Trust

Trust

There’s a visible gap between the hands of the free-falling trapeze artist and those of her companion coming up to catch her.   A gap that makes my stomach lurch just looking at it.

That gap is filled with trust.  Trust that a promise made is a promise kept.

What happens, when trust gets eroded?   When we discover that institutions and corporates aren’t keeping the promises they made?   That the ham we’ve just bought that doesn’t actually contain ham?  The car we’ve just bought puts out more emissions than we were sold?   The pension we were relying on has been appropriated by the firm we’ve worked for for 40 years?  The news we read on social media and in the papers is fake?

When trust disappears, we stop taking risks.   We narrow our perspective.   We lower our expectations.   We start accepting worse instead of expecting better.   Cynicism starts to poison everything.

The only antidote is to make our own promises, the biggest we can, in spite of that stomach-lurching gap, and keep them every time.

Be more Pirate

Be more Pirate

I vividly recall one networking meeting where, one after another, 6 accountants stood up and pitched themselves with “You all know what I do, I’m an accountant.  I’m looking for anyone who needs an accountant.”.

No wonder accountants have a reputation for being boring.

They aren’t of course, but until now they have been a key part of the compliance necessary for anyone running a business, which means that in the whole, they haven’t needed to market themselves, let alone differentiate themselves from other accountants.

Now that meeting compliance is being eaten away by automation, forward-thinking accountants are looking for new ways to make themselves necessary, this time based on what the customer wants and needs, not what the regulator requires.

That’s why I’m launching The Pioneers, a club for accountants who want to ‘be more pirate’.

If you know anyone who you think would like to be part of it, please pass this on.

Thank you.

 

Why do I need process if I have good people? Memory

Why do I need process if I have good people? Memory

Why do I need process if I have good people?

Without a process, some of the knowledge of “what we do here” and as importantly, “how we do things round here” and “why we do what we do” gets lost every time one of your ‘good people’ leaves.   This knowledge also gets changed as new people join.

This can be overcome by a founder that spends time and energy ‘policing’ the culture (think Steve Jobs), but one day even the founder will disappear.

Process gives your business a memory of its own.

That memory needn’t be prescriptive.  The most detailed score still leaves room for interpretation, and you can make it more improv if that’s your style.

If the business always remembers the “what”, “how” and “why”, your people don’t need to make it up as they go along.

Persuasion

Persuasion

All marketing is designed to invoke action.

The difference between persuasion and manipulation is who really benefits.

Bananarama

Bananarama

“It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it.  That’s what gets results.”

I disagree.

“The way we do things round here” clearly reflects the culture of an organisation or institution.   So does “What we do around here”  – the things an organisation or institution chooses to do, and the things it decides to leave out.

So what really gets results is to be clear about the promises that are being made, and intentionally design the ‘what’ to deliver on that in a way that embodies the ‘way’.

Not to be a straightjacket or monorail, just so it isn’t only in the heads of the people who happen to be around right now.

Thanks to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day for inspiring this one.

Not freedom or order, but freedom and order.

Not freedom or order, but freedom and order.

This is the second post inspired by an extract from ‘Leadership and The New Science’ by Margaret Wheatley, entitled “Change, Stability, and Renewal: The Paradoxes of Self-Organising Systems

To recap: if a business has a strong frame of reference in place – its Promise of Value and its ‘way we do things round here’ – then it can be confident that any changes that occur will be consistent with that frame of reference.

This means that not only a business can afford to be open to small variations (what Holacracy calls ‘tensions’), it needs to be – especially to small, persistent variations that are driven by the people it serves – its customers.

This in turn means that it makes sense to give people full autonomy to respond to variation, because you know they will do so in line with the Promise of Value at the core of the business, so no harm will be done, and because what starts as a small variation may well turn into a new opportunity, a new product or service, a new way of doing things, that makes the business stronger and more stable over time.

Most of us like things to stay the same, we seek order and predictability.   We fear that loosening control will lead to too much fluctuation and eventually chaos, so we tend to keep systems rigid and control centralised.

The paradox is that the opposite is what we need to maintain the identity and stability of our business over the long term.

Not freedom or order, but freedom and order.

Discipline makes daring possible.

 

Us and Them

Us and Them

Nothing says ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ quite like a wall.   Whichever side you’re on.

Except of course that isn’t how people work.

In practice, each fort along the wall becomes the nucleus of a community, a vicus or neighbourhood, made up of the garrison and the local people who service it; adopting each others’ fashions, assimilating aspects of each others culture.

As a business, it pays to be really clear who your Promise is for; to put a metaphorical wall around ‘Us’, so that a prospect can easily tell which side they are on.

But it shouldn’t be set in stone.  Walk your boundaries regularly, see where new neighbourhoods are forming and adjust accordingly.

 

PS my friend Lisa Settle is trekking the other Wall to raise funds for more research into Type 1 Diabetes.