Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Culture

Friends
March 3, 2022

Friends

Our modern world is built on treating people like strangers.  That means we can concentrate on things, on the transactions through which we acquire things, ignoring the human being(s) behind them.

That makes life very convenient, but it also makes it unsatisfying.

It also makes it dangerous.   It’s easier to attack a stranger than a friend.  And when you’re used to ‘unseeing’ people, even those you’ve lived among for decades can easily become strangers.

How lovely then to be working with clients who want to build a global enterprise based on mutual benefit and trust.  On people, not on things. Between friends, not strangers.

How lucky I am to be their friend too.

Our best selves
January 25, 2022

Our best selves

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:

  • logical and creative,
  • thinking and feeling,
  • independent and communal,
  • autonomous and collaborative,
  • leading and following,
  • familiar and innovative,
  • left brain and right brain,
  • etcetera,
  • etcetera,

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.

Goodbye 2021
December 20, 2021

Goodbye 2021

This will be my last post for 2021.

It’s been a heck of a year, and 2022 looks like it’s going to carry on this new tradition.

I hope your 2022 will start as your 2021 ends – merrily, with goodwill to all men.

That’s all we really need.

Bullshit Jobs
December 16, 2021

Bullshit Jobs

This week, I’ve mostly been re-reading this book by David Graeber, published what seems like a lifetime ago in 2018.

In 2015, YouGov published a poll, showing that when asked whether their job “makes a meaningful contribution to the world?” 37% of respondents said ‘no’, and 13% of people said they didn’t know.  That’s a terrible waste of human potential.

Until recently many of those 37% or 13% will have been furloughed, while many of the other 50% weren’t – their jobs (care workers, nurses, shop workers, bus-drivers etc) were simply too ‘key’ to allow that, or they were self-employed.

I wonder whether furlough gave some of the 37% time to re-think what they wanted from work?   Is that what’s behind ‘The Great Resignation”?

What seems to be fairly clear from my re-reading of this book, is where most of those ‘bullshit jobs’ are.   They’re in corporates, or privatised government agencies.

Where they aren’t is in small businesses.

One more reason why I believe bigger small businesses are the future.

Bollards
December 9, 2021

Bollards

 

There are quite a few traffic bollards near where I live.   They are there because in the past, drivers persisted in using the narrow pavements inappropriately, endangering other road users, and damaging the fabric of the public realm.

For at least one set, the need has disappeared.  Lorries delivering to the school across the road used to go up onto the pavement in order to reverse through the gate.  The school has since moved and widened their gate, making this manoeuvre unnecessary.   The bollards remain, narrowing the pavement even further.

Bollards, like rules, are a last resort.  A physical or legal barrier erected to block behaviours that have proved impossible to prevent by other means.

The trouble with this is that most bollards don’t tell you why they were erected.  They seem arbitrary, so they leave behaviour untouched.

But if you design them with a bit of imagination, they can both block undesirable behaviour in the moment, and change it for the future.

In other words, rules, like bollards, are part of a process, not an event in themselves, and if you treat them that way, you’ll make them more effective.

Cultivating culture
December 6, 2021

Cultivating culture

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?

Reconciliation
November 30, 2021

Reconciliation

You run a business with a partner.  One of you hates not knowing what’s going to happen, the other loves that.   One favours planning, the other seeing what happens.  This is a source of much tension.

How could you reconcile these opposites to get the best of both worlds?

Simple.

Give yourself a safety net.  A floor below which things cannot go.  Or as Mr Nassim Taleb would have it, protect yourself against the downside.

Design repeatable processes that ensure ‘the least that should happen’.  The planner will be much more comfortable with possibility when you’ve ruled out the worst.  You can both be open to the upside.

When you find it, move the net up, and repeat.

This doesn’t only work for partners, it can help everyone who works with you to reconcile their individual appetites for risk.

Games we play
November 23, 2021

Games we play

I was reading yesterday about 2 kinds of games – finite and infinite.  Finite games are those where the game stops when somebody wins.  They could also be called zero-sum games.  For someone to win, everyone else has to lose.  Finite and zero-sum games are based on scarcity.

Infinite games on the other hand, are not about winning, they are about keeping the game going.  The game is eternal, which means there is no scarcity.   As a player I may drop out, but the game goes on, with other players.  The game can also get bigger, there is no limit to how many people can play.

We tend to play an infinite game with our personal relationships.  We don’t keep score with our family and friends.  We assume, safely on the whole, not that a favour will be returned as a quid pro quo, but that if we are in need, help will be given.

Our assumption is that business is a zero-sum game.  Where for me to win, the planet has to lose.  Or other businesses have to lose.  Or customers have to lose.  Or where my team have to lose.

What if you assumed it was an infinite game?  That business is about keeping the game going for everyone, forever?

Would you play differently?

Three Freedoms
November 19, 2021

Three Freedoms

What is freedom, really?

Here’s a possible definition, not mine*.  Three freedoms, each building on the one before.

  1. The freedom to walk away, knowing that you will be taken in elsewhere by other people who see you as one of them.
  2. The freedom to disobey, knowing that you can ‘vote with your feet’.
  3. The freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.

The third can’t happen without the first two.  Not without becoming tyranny, anyway.

These are big ideas, but since our businesses can be anything we want, we can practise them small.

 

 

*In the sense that I didn’t think of them.  They come from “The Dawn of Everything” by David Wengrow and David Graeber.

The world turned upside down
November 18, 2021

The world turned upside down

Until a couple of years ago, I throught cleaning your teeth was about cleaning your teeth.

It turns out I was wrong.  It’s about cleaning your gumline.  Because it’s not so much about getting rid of food debris, as cleaning up after the bacteria that live in your mouth.  Who breed and create debris (plaque) whether you eat or not.

There are lots of things we think we know, that actually turn out to be wrong, or at least capable of alternative interpretations.   The more alternatives we see, the more we can imagine even better ones.

If you’re up for it, here are a few of the books that have turned my world of ideas upside down:

Of course, every book does this to some extent – even the ones you’ve read before, because you can’t step into the same river twice.

Which books would you recommend?