Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Community

Game theory
March 13, 2023

Game theory

One of the recurring ‘complaints’ voiced by presenters of shows like The Great British Bake-off, The Great Pottery Throw-down, The Great British Sewing Bee etc.,  is that the contestants insist on helping each other – right down to the final.

Our natural instinct it seems, is to play an infinite game with our peers.

Of course it is, because that’s the only way to make the real gains –  new skills, alternative perspectives, increased self-confidence and a bunch of lifelong friends.

We only really win if everyone wins.

Impacting Earth
February 17, 2023

Impacting Earth

Of course your business doesn’t just impact the people immediately involved in it.

It also impacts Earth, therefore other inhabitants too.   Possibly in ways you can’t currently see.

You may not be responsible for the entirety of the impact, but perhaps you contribute.

Just as, by outsourcing my accounting to an accountant, I don’t employ someone directly, but contribute to the employment of the people who work for my accountant, so, by using a laptop and mobile for my work, I contribute to the pollution and oppression created by a lithium mine.

The point is to be aware.  Then to ramp up the positives and minimise the negatives.

That might mean changing how you do business, or even what you do, to play your part in creating a safe and just space for humanity here on our planet:

 

One thing’s for certain, you won’t be short of work.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

What the world needs now
February 10, 2023

What the world needs now

The idea of ikigai is a practical tool for helping yourself to fit in with the world as it is:

Eugenio Hansen, OFS, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>,

What if the diagram looked like this instead:

Finding happiness would be much easier, if we didn’t have to work for a living.

Maybe what the world really needs is a change of system.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Nodes
January 27, 2023

Nodes

Yesterday I learned two things from the same street in Soho.

The first was that when you try and force yourself into the box that society/the system has made for you, you may very well die.

The second was that when you design your own box, then connect it with those of other like-hearted people, you become a node, enabling yourself and everyone around you to be so much more than society/the system expects.

It might just be me, but it feels like the nodes are winning, in spite of everything the system/society is throwing at them.

Entanglement
January 18, 2023

Entanglement

Apparently, feeling connected to other people is beneficial to humans.

Perhaps it comes from the fact that at a quantum level everything is entangled.  Connection and interdependence is the natural state of things.

Connection makes us healthier and happier.   It also makes us powerful.

Doesn’t that feel good?

A disappearing act
January 11, 2023

A disappearing act

You don’t have to lose your business to be able to leave it.

You just have to take yourself out of the day-to-day.

To do this, make everyone a boss.   Get the music that’s in your head written down so that other people can play it.  Give your people the responsibility and the autonomy to deliver your business’s unique customer experience consistently, in their own style.

The sooner you do this, the sooner you get to choose how much time you want to spend in your business, the sooner you free the business to grow and the sooner you’ll free your people to grow too.

Best of all, you get to keep everything that makes your business uniquely yours.

In the end, you’ll have built a community, not just a business.  A community centred around the promises you make and keep for the people you serve.  A community that becomes your legacy.

Ask me how.

The irony is that all this makes it an even more attractive buy.

But of course by then you won’t want to sell.

Trespassing
December 5, 2022

Trespassing

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been intrigued by the use of the word ‘trespass’ in the King James version of the Lord’s prayer – “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us”.

Why not ‘sin’, ‘wrongdoing’, ‘misbehaviour’, ‘offence’, ‘crime’?

The word ‘trespass’ has a very specific meaning – to cross a boundary into a space that belongs to someone else.   So why pick this word?

Perhaps because, in 1611, at the very dawn of capitalism, the authors wanted to remind us of the mutuality of our existence.   The fact that any rights we have as individuals must be bounded by the rights of others.

I am free to do whatever I like, as long as that doesn’t impinge on anyone else’s right to do whatever they like.   Which means in practice, that I must constantly consider others, present and future, in everything I do.

It seems to me that’s as true of a business or organisation just as much as an individual.

What if it was never about the things?
November 29, 2022

What if it was never about the things?

First nation peoples and clever marketers have known for a long time that Sharing your Promise is never really about selling the thing.  It’s about how that thing affects our relationship with ourselves and with others.  So what you’re really selling is a change of relations.

Which means of course, that when it comes to Keeping your Promise, you’re not really delivering the thing.   You’re delivering the shift in relationships signified and caused by the thing.

Which means that’s what the Customer Experience should be all about.

Which means that’s what should be in your Customer Experience Score.

And why keeping it human matters.

Autumn Statement
November 17, 2022

Autumn Statement

Economics is not a science.   How could it be?   It works with and on and around human beings.

It’s an art.  That used to be called political economy.  Until economists with certain politics decided to change that, to make it sound more scientific.

Nevertheless, economics, unlike physics (whose laws will be true even when we are no longer around to observe them), remains a purely human construct.   Something we make up to explain how the world works.

That means it can be wrong.   There can be alternatives which explain things better, or produce different results.   It all depends on the politics and the assumptions that politics makes about human beings.

So, if you’re interested in alternative economic constructs, here are some books I recommend:

  • The Deficit Myth
  • Doughnut Economics
  • 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism
  • The Joy of Tax
  • The Production of Money
  • Poor Economics
  • The Value of Everything
  • Everything for Everyone
  • Capital in the 21st Century and it’s companion Capital and Ideology.
  • Principles of political economy and taxation
  • The Wealth of Nations
  • Capital

They’re all wrong of course.

But depending on what you’re trying to achieve they may be more helpful.

And at least you can make up your own mind.

 

 

 

Tonight’s the night
October 31, 2022

Tonight’s the night

Tonight marks the start of Hallowtide.  The time when, in the Christian calendar and the Roman one before it, people remember the dead who came before.

For 300,000 years humans have come before us.  All dead now.

Gathering a pile of stuff we don’t need, can’t make safely or dispose of cleanly seems a poor way to celebrate their memory.