Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible

Better tools
August 12, 2019

Better tools

One of my favourite Seth Godin aphorisms is this one:

“Make things better by making better things.”

Making things better is what humans do.  And we mostly do it by creating new, better tools – tools for making and tools for doing; tools for organising and tools for co-ordinating; tools for learning and tools for thinking; tools for connecting and tools for feeling.

For me, great tools extend human capabilities without undermining the humanity behind them or the context around them.   They make us both more human and more part of the world we live in.

Our very best tool is our ability to re-imagine what ‘better’ means.

Counting
August 9, 2019

Counting

“No taxation without representation!”

We’re all familar with the demand that triggered the American war of independence.

Colonists felt it was deeply unfair that they should have no say on how they were governed from afar, but still had to pay duties on luxury goods received via that far-off government.

Nowadays there are those who would like to flip this idea around, claiming that those who pay ‘no tax’ should not be represented in government.

This is based on misinformation of course, ‘no tax’ in this case means ‘no income tax’.   People who are not eligible to pay income tax still pay national insurance, VAT, fuel duty, tobacco and alcohol duties, car tax, insurance tax, and these taxes often represent a significant proportion of their income.

What those suggesting “No representation without taxation” are really saying is “You don’t count.”

Tax is far too important to merely avoid.   Time to think differently about it, before it’s too late.

 

 

Lenses
August 8, 2019

Lenses

We all see the world through our own particular lenses of values, experience, beliefs.   We wear those lenses closely, as if they are part of us.

We form them through conversation, reading, watching – by temporarily seeing through other people’s lenses.

It’s important to be aware of this.  It’s also important to actively seek out different lenses through which to view the world.

Otherwise, its easy for those lenses to become blinkers.

Do no harm
August 7, 2019

Do no harm

One of the books I’m reading at the moment is “Jainism and Ethical Finance”, by Atul K. Shah and Aidan Rankin.

The first vow taken as a Jain is ahiṃsā  – non-violence or the desire to do no harm.

The interesting thing about this is that it extends beyond humans to animals, insects, microbes and even plants.   Strict Jains are vegetarians who do not eat roots, because this destroys a plant’s ability to reproduce itself.

That is a very thought-through concept of impact, that we could all learn from.

Especially as it doesn’t prevent Jains becoming highly successful business owners.

Neighbours
August 6, 2019

Neighbours

Last night, on my way to my pilates class, I spotted one of my neighbours leaving the house of another.

I happen to know that she visits this neighbour every day, with a meal, with shopping, to have a chat.  She’s been doing it for at least 30 years.

For no other reason than that they are neighbours.

What struck me last night was the sweatshirt she was wearing.

“Love will save us” it said.

She’s right.  Nothing else will.

Fluff
August 5, 2019

Fluff

A metaphor for the relationship your business creates with its clients could be seen as fluff.   A nice marketing touch.  Something to hang a campaign on, to help people choose you over others.

But it can and should go much deeper than that.

Blue Rocket Accounting used their metaphor (“we are Mission Control to your space mission”) to standardise their services, to define the Roles people working in the business play for clients and to design how they deliver on that promise.  The metaphor becomes shorthand for the purpose – ‘what we do for the people we serve’.

That’s not fluff.  That’s the foundation.

Increasing revenues
August 2, 2019

Increasing revenues

Profit = Revenue – Cost.

So if you can reduce cost, you can increase profit. And if you can increase revenue you can also increase profit.

So how do you do that?

The classic answer is that there are only 4 ways:

  • Sell to more customers
  • Sell more at a time to each customer
  • Sell more frequently to each customer
  • Put your prices up

This is of course true, but it misses a vital point.   Nowadays, whatever business you are in, there are hundreds of options for customers to choose from.   Why should they buy from you?   Why should they pay you more than the next business?

Unless you are operating in some unfortunate part of the world, nobody really needs anything any more.   For example, we all need to eat, but do we really need 25 different kinds of cornflake?  Do we really need cornflakes at all?

No.

The truth is that you’re not selling anything.   You’re making a promise.   A promise to help the people you serve become who they really want to be.   That’s what people are willing to pay for.   The bigger and better the promise, the more it will be worth to the right person.   That’s how you increase revenues.

The hard part is working out who is the right person, and who it is they want to become.

And the hardest part is keeping the promise you make.

Performance – costs and revenues
July 31, 2019

Performance – costs and revenues

As we all know, profit is what’s left of revenue after you’ve taken out all the cost.

Revenue is easy to measure.  Cost is a little harder.

Ideally, you would directly attribute every cost incurred by a business (including what would normally be called ‘overhead’) to the end-to-end process of acquiring and serving a single client with their chosen product or service.

This is a time-consuming thing to do, which is why many small businesses work on a rule of thumb of some kind, such as the ‘one third wages, one third overhead, one third profits’ approximation used by many accountants.

It turns out though*, that ‘time spent’ is a pretty accurate proxy for all costs, so a relatively easy way to get an accurate picture of how much a process is costing to run, is to measure how much time is spent on running it.

This means that the efficiency of a business as a system can be measured in a straightforward way – by simple observation.

I like simple and straightforward systems, so this makes me extremely happy.

*”Duration-Based Costing: Utilizing Time in Assigning Costs” Anne-Marie Lelkes, Ph.D., CPA, Management Accounting Quarterly, Summer 2017.

Good feedback
July 30, 2019

Good feedback

Good feedback is:

  • Objective.   ‘You’re crap at this’  doesn’t help.   “You tend to pull to the left” does.
  • Specific.  “Try harder” doesn’t help.   “Try aiming to the right of where you want to land” does.
  • Enabling.  “Like this” doesn’t help.  “Let me put your arm in the right place so you can feel how it should be” does.
  • Timely.  “A week ago you threw short” doesn’t help.   “That last throw was only out by an inch” does.

Feedback is good when it tells the recipient something about the process, because the process is what you have to change to improve the result.

Feedback is even better if it can come from the process itself, because then the person running the process has autonomy as well as responsibility.

A cattle-prod, physical or emotional, isn’t feedback.  It’s just bullying.