Culture – Page 23 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

July 4, 2019

Happy Birthday

James Lovelock is 100 years old today.

Dr Lovelock is best known for his ‘Gaia hypothesis’ – the idea that living things interact with their non-living environment to create a synergistic, self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life.

The hypothesis has come in for a lot of criticism over the years (after all, it is a hypothesis, not a theory), but the idea of the Earth as a system seems obvious to us now.

This wasn’t the case when Lovelock developed his idea, while working at NASA in the 60’s. And for me, this is the core of his contribution – he gave scientists a new paradigm for thinking about the Earth and our relationship to it, that enabled them to improve our understanding of how it works, and how it might evolve.

That’s quite an achievement.

Happy Birthday Dr Lovelock!

June 28, 2019

Questions

People are asking big questions about accountancy.

Both from a technology perspective, as in this paper from Deloitte, and from a more existential perspective, exemplified by Professor Richard Murphy and the Corporate Accountability Network.

Big changes create great opportunities to re-think our models of the world as consumers and as producers.

Where do you think accountancy should go? What should accountants do? For whom? What do we want from accountants? Most importantly, what could we want? What should we want?

Big questions, now is a good time to ask them.

June 20, 2019

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

Why do I need process if I have good people?

As Japanese businesses know well, process embodies the ‘thing’ a group of people are working on – whether that’s a play, a car, a building or a service.

This allows a certain level of separation between ‘what I am trying to achieve’ and ‘who I am’, which makes it much easier for everyone involved to discuss and agree improvements, because it’s ‘the thing’ that’s being judged, not ‘me’.

Free from the fear of personal criticism, your good people can eagerly look for ways to make things better.

June 17, 2019

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.

June 13, 2019

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.

May 29, 2019

Significance

A worker honey bee will make just over 0.4 grams of honey over its lifetime.

That seems an almost insignificant contribution – about a twelfth of a teaspoon.

But as one of a hive of 30,000 bees, it mounts up.

If you’re trying to make change happen, recruit the others.

May 13, 2019

Profit. What does it really mean?

Our word ‘Profit’ comes from a Latin verb proficere.

It’s meanings include:

to advance, make progress
to benefit, profit, take advantage
to help contribute, be useful
to depart, set out

Proficere itself is a combination of two words, ‘pro’ (meaning forwards) and ‘ficere’ which means:

to do
to make, construct, fashion, frame, build, erect
to produce, compose
to appoint

Ultimately this can be traced right back to proto-Sanskrit as a word that means ‘do, put, place’ – a word that represents our sense of agency in the world.

Why do we insist on reducing all this richness to mere coin?

May 10, 2019

Metrics

If a business is a system for making and keeping promises, how do you measure its performance?

Some metrics:

How many promises you make, and how many you keep.
How much someone pays you to keep your promise to them.
How much it costs you to make a promise, and how much to keep it.
How much it costs you to resource, monitor and improve the way you make and keep your promises.

You could add:

How much it costs the planet for you to run this system.
How much you increase these things for yourself, your team and your clients:
- Agency
- Mastery
- Autonomy
- Purpose
- Community

Simple.

May 7, 2019

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.

April 18, 2019

Rest

For at least the last 189 years, we’ve known that overburdening people, equipment and systems leads to mistakes, wasted effort and sometimes, tragedy. We know that people, systems and even equipment need rest. Time out to repair, recharge and recalibrate.

In the past, days off work were imposed by law – admittedly not so people could rest, but so they could observe religious holy days, but at least they were guaranteed non-working days for almost everyone.

That is no longer the case. Now that consumerism is the national religion and online shopping never stops, we are individually responsible for making sure we take rest days. And the vestiges of our national holidays make that a bit easier to achieve.

So, this is my reminder to have a break. From work, from shopping, from the day-to-day.

Enjoy the long weekend.

See you Tuesday.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Culture