Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 112 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

September 10, 2019

Relics

Yesterday, I drove across the Peak District, along the Derwent Valley and up through Glossop to Calderdale.

Almost the whole way, wherever there was a river below, the valley was thick with old mill buildings, built to last. Some famous, like Arkwright’s Cromford and Masson Mills, now world heritage sites. Most forgotten, derelict, or hidden in the core of industrial estates, or turned into housing.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were well over 100 cotton mills in this area, their owners rushing to embrace the new business model pioneered by Arkwright – a factory powered by water.

Within 30 years, many of them were out of business. A new technology shift had taken place, from water power to steam, which meant independence from rivers, and freedom from the size constraints imposed by valleys. Small factory owners, unable to justify the investment could no longer compete and went under.

Now of course, very little cotton is spun or woven in the UK. Yet more technology shifts meant that even large factories drifted slowly into obsolescence.

To us now, this is history. But technology is always shifting, increasingly in people-based service industries like accounting, consulting and law.

You can embrace the latest business model, or make a virtue of keeping to the old. The trick is to do it consciously, keeping an eye out for whats next.

September 9, 2019

Embracing variation

Nature loves variation.

Small errors, mishaps and mistakes make a species stronger, not weaker. They make the system antifragile.

Fine china does not love variation. Even the smallest of mishaps can cause irrecoverable damage.

If you want a business that lasts, its better to design it to be more of a system than a dinner service. But that doesn’t mean formless.

Build a strong core of values, purpose and ethos, embodied in simple high-level processes that describe ‘what’ not ‘how’, and you too can get to love variation.

And variation is what leads to evolution.

September 6, 2019

Affiliation

We all have our own way of seeing the world – our own view of how we think it works, what motivates ourselves and others, what’s acceptable and what’s not. That worldview informs how we act in the world – what we read, what we watch, what we buy, who we are drawn to.

Much of that worldview can be based on fact – physics, for example – but a surprising amount of it is opinion. That makes everything political, because everything we do is a negotiation between our worldview and the worldviews of the people and organisations we deal with.

Life is easier if those negotiations mostly take place with people and organisations with whom we share important aspects of our worldview. People and organisations we feel an affiliation with.

But we have to be careful, because some people and some organisations, are willing to pretend to a worldview they don’t really hold, in order to win our affiliation and trust, for their benefit, not ours. And in our always-on, non-stop, social-media-driven globalised world, that is easier than ever to do.

That means 2 things:

As individuals we have a responsibility to each other as honest human beings, to put some effort into not being conned, by digging a bit deeper, checking that deeds match words, that the ‘person’ we are talking to is who they say they are, so that we can to be true to our own worldview.

And as businesses we need to be absolutely clear that what we promise is true, then fearless about sharing it.

If everything is political, we have more power than we think.

September 5, 2019

Good design is long-lasting

“It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.” Dieter Rams Design Principle number 7.

When a service process captures the ‘what has to happen’ without getting too bogged down in the ‘how it happens now’, it lasts. It stays meaningful, and as a result stays useful, and used.

This is possible because human beings are very good at grasping an overall structure, and very good at flexing themselves around it to deal with a specific situation.

So let them. In a service business, variation is information.

September 4, 2019

Buying Customers

Acquisition is a common form of expansion. Especially where customers buy regularly and repeatedly. As the buyer, you add a whole bunch of new customers in one go, in bulk. As the seller you get to cash in on all those years of hard work.

So far, so good.

For employees, takeover or merger often leads to culture shock, as two distinct (and probably inarticulate) Promises of Value clash in the new business. This is a recognised issue that gets attention and effort from the buyer.

But what about customers?

Often, they don’t even know until after the event, when they call for support and find the rules have changed on them, or see the size of their next bill.

What do you think they feel when they find out?

Perhaps they don’t care, as long as there is no difference in the service they get or the fees they have to pay. They didn’t have a relationship with the previous company and they don’t with the new one either. These customers will stay until a significantly better offer comes along, as sooner or later it will.

Perhaps they are delighted – because the new rules make things easier for them, and efficiencies or economies of scale make their bills lower. These customers will stay, and tell everyone why.

Or perhaps they feel belittled, betrayed and angry. They had a relationship with the previous company. They had chosen it because of its values and ethos. They had bought in to its Promise of Value. This company and the way it worked had become part of their life, and now you’ve taken that away. Worse still, you’ve treated them as a commodity. These customers will leave, and tell everyone why.

What’s the answer?

Aim for delighted, every time.

September 3, 2019

Gassaku

Gassaku, or ‘joint work’, is, unsurprisingly, a Japanese concept, where each collaborator’s contribution is celebrated and acknowledged, while recognising that the completed work transcends all of them.

In the west, we’ve become so used to the idea of the lone artist, the single originator, the star founder, that we are almost blind to joint work. Except perhaps, when we watch a film, and see at the end the enormous numbers of people that helped to make it.

Yet all work is joint work. We achieve nothing alone.

Everything we do is built on the work of others – not just those around us now, but those who have gone before. Not just work that directly contributes to our achievements, but the work (not always paid) that built and continues to build and maintain all the infrastructures that enable them.

Time we acknowledged their contributions.

September 2, 2019

Good Design makes a product understandable

It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory. Dieter Rams, Design Principle number 4.

How many times have you pulled at a door that was meant to be pushed? Or pushed a door that was meant to be pulled?

There are 4 simple design solutions that would prevent that tiny but all too frequent source of wasted energy and frustration:

Put a flat plate on the ‘push’ side and a handle on the ‘pull’ side.
Allow the door to swing both ways, and have a flat plate on both sides (because both are now ‘push’).
Allow the door to swing both ways, and have a handle on both sides (because both are now ‘pull’).
Have the door open automatically as someone approaches it.

1, 2 and 3 make the door understandable, 4 makes it self-explanatory.

We live and work among millions of designed products every day, from doors to roundabouts and office blocks to business processes, organisational structures and governments, many of which provide all too frequent sources of wasted energy and frustration.

How would you re-design them?

August 30, 2019

Stakeholders

I found this on the Corporate Accountability Network‘s site the other day: “The Corporate Accountability Network thinks that every company, … Read More “Stakeholders”

August 29, 2019

We

“What can I do? I’m only one person.”

Find the others.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead

August 28, 2019

Brave New Worlds

The term ‘robot’ was coined in in 1920 by Josef Čapek for his brother Karel. The word meant “forced labour”.

For all the impressive advances in robotics since then, some of which we saw on the BBC series ‘Revolutions‘ last night, the idea of “forced labour” – including, for Jim Al-Kalili, child-rearing – remains almost unquestioned.

It reminded me that we humans often dive into technology, when we should be re-thinking how we relate to each other.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible