Community – Page 11 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

February 17, 2021

Loyalty

I was tidying up my digital desktop today, and came across an old article by Umair Haque, written for HBR magaizine.

6 years after it was published, Haque’s message seems more important than ever.

If you want customers that come back to your business regularly, freely, joyfully, “focus on giving people what matters most to them — but what they feel cheated of, stymied from, and suffocated by at every turn. Improve their lives. Deliver lasting gains in their quality of life. Don’t just carrot-and-stick them into “loyalty.” Be loyal to them. Don’t win their attention — give them your attention. And one tiny interaction at a time, help them live lives richer with meaning, happiness, and purpose.”

And always be asking this question: “How loyal can we be to our customers?”

January 18, 2021

Self-determination

I’ve spent the whole of the day re-setting and rebuilding my computer. Windows simply refused to restart. No reason was given, no error messages, no hint of what might have caused it, just an escalating series of interventions that culminated in a factory reset.

That’s my day gone. I don’t have a choice. My laptop is infrastructure. I need it to work.

Imagine if corporations like Microsoft decided to do that to us on purpose.

It’s easy to miss where power really lies.

January 12, 2021

Meeting Spec

Specifications highlight the difference between value creators and value extractors brilliantly.

Value creators treat specifications as minima. They’re always looking to see far they can go above and beyond, within the time and financial constraints they face. For them the spec is a starting point.

Value extractors, on the other hand, view specs as maxima. They’re always looking to see how little they can get away with, how much they can bend the definitions, while still being able to say they’ve met the specification. For them the spec is the bar, and they’re always trying to lower it.

Extractors win in the short term. But the future belongs to the creators. Especially if they collaborate with each other.

The picture is 2 days worth of lunches for a Finnish schoolchild during lockdown last year.

December 4, 2020

Contexts

One of the many things I like about Lou Downe’s book “Good Services”, is that it goes beyond the boundaries of the service, even of the business. For example, as part of principle number 12: “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”, this comes up:

“A good service is good for everyone

Users

Staff

Your organisation

The world”

Here’s a useful tool for judging how your business is doing with that:

Check out the Doughnut Economics Action Lab for more useful tools and ideas on this. Including how ‘the doughnut’ varies across countries and the world – opening up some astonishing opportunities for business as a force for good.

Do you remember writing your name out as a child? Locating your intensely individual self inside progressively larger contexts until you reached ‘The Universe’?

When did we forget how to do that?

It’s a game worth repeating now and then.

November 23, 2020

Constructive interference

We don’t know what we don’t know. Neither do we know what our clients and colleagues don’t know. And we often take for granted the things we do know.

So, a useful thing to do every day might be to ask:

“What do I take for granted that I know, that the people I serve don’t or may not know?

How could I best share that?

It’s a ripple in a pond, but who knows where it might end up?

November 5, 2020

Foraging

Mushrooms seem like fleeting things. Ephemeral. Fragile. And they are. But the mycelium that throws them up is long-lived, non-stop … Read More “Foraging”

November 2, 2020

Spell it out

I chuckled to myself as I approached the till, after waiting in line for a while.

“I’m laughing at myself” I explained to the woman sat behind it, “because you can’t see me smiling at you.“

I’d forgotten that I was, of course, wearing a face covering.

“No.” she replied.

“Well I am smiling at you.“

She laughed back at me.

Sometimes, it really helps to spell it out.

October 21, 2020

This was last weekend’s reading.

Strangely enough, they are related. I recommend reading them together.

September 4, 2020

Eulogy

Yesterday, I found out that one of my favourite authors, the anthropologist David Graeber had died suddenly, unexpectedly and too soon, the day before.

I am gutted. Not just because I was looking forward to learning from him for a lot longer, but because he also seemed to be such an entirely admirable person. Intelligent, articulate, active, radical. As an anarchist, highly critical of human institutions. As an anarchist and anthropologist, utterly fond of human beings.

Some well-known people give mankind a good name. For me, David Graeber was one of them.

September 3, 2020

Avoiding Bureaucracy

For Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini the opposite of ‘humanocracy’ is ‘bureaucracy’:

“In a bureaucracy, human beings are instruments, employed by an organization to create products and services. In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument – it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.”

Here’s a quote from Dee Hock that I think, sums up nicely how we get to ‘bureaucracy’:

“We grow to detest any societal organization in which we have no secure place and can find no meaningful life. We ignore it when we can, circumvent it when we must, destroy it if we are able. An organization that does not provide a secure, equitable, meaningful place for each person of which it is composed is not civilised at all; it is to a greater or lesser degree, tyrannical and barbaric.”

In truth, all organisations are instruments, consciously or unconsciously wielded. As Eric Reis observed to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky:

“The product you make is not your website, it’s not the travel, its not even the delightful experiences, the product is the organisation that brings stakeholders together to produce those outcomes.”

The questions to ask are:

Whose lives are you bettering?
At what cost to the rest of the world?

It seems to me, that if we want to build a truly successful enterprise that will carry on without us, we should maximise the answer to the first, and minimse the answer to the second.

Fortunately, we’ve invented several ways to do that. One of which is mine.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Community