Define Promise – Page 3 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

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.

November 29, 2021

I knew that would happen

“I knew that would happen.”

If you knew, why didn’t you do something to prevent it?

Probably because while you knew it was possible or even likely, you hoped it wouldn’t happen.

It would be much better to have a process that deals not only with the 80% of cases where nothing untoward happens, but also with the 20% of cases that don’t work like that. Or even better, one that pre-empts their occurrence.

Let’s say you’re a coffee roaster. You sell beans to lots of small independent coffee shops. It bugs you that they never plan their orders properly, often ringing up to ask for an urgent delivery at a timescale that’s impossible for you to make money on. You’ve made things clear – ‘Order before 6pm for next-day delivery’ – but still they ring at 8pm for an urgent delivery by 8am the next day. What should be exceptional is turning into the norm.

How could you pre-empt this?

You could accept that’s how they work, and find a way to deliver coffee overnight as your default. That might involve putting prices up of course, which might annoy the more forward-thinking of your customers.

You could make them order more each time, so they never run out. That would cost them more of course, and might end up in a stockpile they don’t want to carry.

You could put re-order prompts in or on your packaging, or give them the means to prompt themselves – stickers, or ‘re-order now’ cards.

You could recognise that the people using the coffee may not be the people ordering it, and make it easy for them to start an order – with a QR code on a bag, for instance – that gets confirmed with the person responsible before it’s sent out.

You could find ways to prompt them to re-order, based on how they work. That would involve asking them how they work (or even observing them as a mystery shopper?). That would cost you more up -front, but might make for a closer relationship. There probably aren’t that many different ways to run a coffee-shop, so you would quickly identify most cases. Then you could offer ordering options to new clients, knowing you have a process for dealing with them smoothly

There isn’t a right answer here, except that whenever you say “I knew that would happen”, realise that what you’ve identified isn’t just a pain for you. It’s an opportunity to cement your relationships and differentate yourself from your competitors, just by making your client’s life easier.

November 26, 2021

Stories we tell ourselves

If you knew the stories your family, friends, colleagues, employees and clients are telling themselves you’d be astonished.

The stories we tell ourselves aren’t true. They often don’t help. We keep them to ourselves, but they leak out in our actions, and so how others see us.

What’s the story your business tells itself? Does it help?

If not, share it with your team, and see how you can change it. Your customers and your profits will see the difference.

September 22, 2021

Joining the dots

Before the European invasion, the only use the people of the Americas had for wheels, was for pull-along toys. They used headstraps and pack-animals for carrying things, and made their clay pots by hand-building. Messages were carried by runners.

Perhaps because there were no suitable native draught animals, or because the terrain was too difficult, the possibilities of the wheel were seen, but never applied, except in play. Until of course, the Spanish introduced horses and cattle.

We tend to think of innovation as the creation of new things by a single individual. Actually, much innovation arises from joining the dots. And that only happens once the dots are in place.

Where are the dots being created in your industry? Could you join them to create something new?

September 16, 2021

Why I read fiction

“The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.” George Eliot.

Middlemarch is my favourite work of fiction precisely because George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) succeeds so well in this endeavour.

Not everyone in the book is good, or beautiful, or admirable or likeable, but by the end you feel they are all worthy of the investment of your attention. Even the ‘villains’. You may not approve of everything they do, but you at least understand how they got there. Not through being ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but through being human, by the choices they take at each little fork in the road, how they justify those choices to themselves and how that leads to the route taken at the next fork, and the next.

Reading fiction is one of the most effective ways I know to expand my horizons. I’ve ‘met’ far more people through fiction than I could ever hope to meet in the flesh, from all sorts of backgrounds, times and places. Practising empathy for these characters, written by and about people outside my comfort zone is great practice towards doing it for real.

I know quite a few businesses who keep a library of business books for their team. Perhaps its time to add some fiction.

August 4, 2021

Sunflower moments

“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time.

His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

The vision on the canvas is a third thing, utterly intangible and inexplicable, the offspring of the sunflower itself and van Gogh himself.” D.H. Lawrence.

That ‘third thing’, the ‘vivid relation’ between ‘me’ and the other, is a moment when we feel truly alive, connected, aware of our place in the universe. Such moments don’t only happen to artists. I’ve experienced them while shopping, walking or making dinner. The difference is I’ve never tried to capture them.

It seems to me that much of what we do as humans is about creating opportunities where those ‘sunflower moments’ – that you might also call Sawubona can happen.

What if that is what work was really for?

What if we measured our performance by that?

July 19, 2021

Niche, then niche again

For an individual business, competing with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of other businesses, the key to achieving an above average rate of profit is to differentiate yourself. To de-commoditise your offer. And one way to do that is by specialising how you do things, rather than what you do.

Most coffee shops do the same thing as their competitors, what differs is the mode of delivery, the ambience, sometimes the coffee. In any given high street, where a customer can choose from half a dozen coffee shops, the one they buy from regularly will the one that feels like their kind of coffee shop. For me, its Cuore, an independent Italian, possibly Caffe Nero, never Starbucks or Costa.

The implication here is that any coffee shop is catering to more than a physical need or desire for coffee. My choice of coffee shop says something about my taste in coffee, but more about my values; who I identify with; the lifestyle I aspire to, and who I want to be seen to identify with.

My choices are a function of my mindset, my worldview, not my age, postcode area or gender. My psychographic profile, not my demographic.

When you articulate the Promise of Value for your business, you are identifying your business psychographic, and by extension that of your ideal clients. These are ‘your kind of people’, the people you can serve, who’ll be willing to pay you more than the alternatives available to them. They’ll thank you for being there for them.

Sometimes, this is enough. But if you are a new business, or an existing business looking to expand, it helps to narrow your focus even further to a subset of the people you serve.

This is where demographics becomes useful. If your psychographic tells you what kind of people you’re looking for, demographics tells you where you’re most likely to find them. It can also help you to identify where they are currently being under-served.

That makes psychographics part of your Promise, demographics part of how you share that Promise. Which leads to the following rule of thumb:

Niche your Promise to find the people you can serve best. They’ll thank you for it.

Niche your Share Promise to find the people you can serve best now. They’ll thank you for it now.

April 30, 2021

Motive power

In the old model of business, marketing was something you did last. It answered the question “How can I sell these things I’ve made?”.

Today, to be effective, marketing comes first, because it answers the question “Who can I best serve and how?”.

In this new model of business, your Promise of Value is the engine, and the motive power is empathy. A fuel available to everyone.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Define Promise