It will be rebuilt.
It’s a disaster, but it’s also an opportunity to create a story worth remembering about community, craftmanship and caring. One more layer in this palimpsest of Parisian, French and human culture.
If only we felt the same for every building that burns.
Everyone, it seems, is looking for ‘passive income’ – money you don’t have to work hard for, that simply flows from the ownership of an asset.
The most popular asset of this kind is property – land or the buildings on it. The problem with this is that the underlying resource is finite, and the more people want these assets, the higher the price.
Next comes intellectual property – patents, design rights, licenses. These take deep pockets to defend, and ultimately expire.
Then there is debt. This too is limited as a passive income stream because ultimately it kills the source.
There is a type of asset that has none of these limitations. The autonomous enterprise. A business that runs without you, generating income by continuously creating new value for the people it serves, and continually finding new ways to create that value.
Paradoxically, this kind of asset is only possible when you fully devolve management and reward to the people who work in it. That’s not easy to do, it takes courage and a long-view. But those are the only factors that make it scarce.
Given a framework it can thrive in, there is no limit to human ingenuity.
P.S. I discovered writing this that the word ‘asset’ actually comes from the French for ‘enough’. That’s an interesting fact worth remembering.
I’ve written before about the need for something between bespoke and off-the-peg, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about for … Read More “Taking your own medicine”
Do you remember your first driving lesson?
I do. At the end of it I wondered how on earth I was going to be able to remember everything – never mind watch out for pedestrians and other traffic!
But after several lessons I got the hang of it, and eventually of course driving became second nature. To a point where some nights I got home from work almost without realising it.
We humans are able to make a lot of things second nature. Walking, driving, playing the cello, or rugby, or chess.
We do this by repeating certain combinations of actions until they become habit. We no longer need to think about them. That frees us up to to concentrate on the exceptions – those things outside the habitual that are going to prove interesting or dangerous.
But too much reliance on pure habit can also be dangerous. I bet you’ve had to go back to your car after half an hour of shopping because you can’t remember locking it, even though you’re sure you did.
That’s why pilots have checklists. To make a habit of the actions that must be done, and then to make sure they perform those actions consciously every time.
What’s the relevance of this for business? Well, you need to actively create this interesting tension between habit and consciousness:
Then you can happily let them play with the exceptions.
Discipline makes daring possible.
A quick trawl of the internet found me these definitions of the verb “to delegate”:
In most cases the meaning is not ‘doing your work for you’, but ‘acting on your behalf’.
In other words, the key relationship is not between you and the person you delegate to, but between you and the clients they serve as if they were you.
Not employees. Agents. Or ambassadors.
People you can trust to do the right thing.
“The most successful forms start with identifying what is on the outside that they need to interact with and then working their way back into finding the form that best suits their external purpose.”*
For a business the key ‘outside’ thing that ‘they need to interact with’ is the customer. The interaction is making and keeping the business’s Promise.
So to me, it makes sense to build a supporting framework that reflects this. That way, everyone knows what the business is there to do.
*herman wagter & jean m. russell, cultivating flows.
One of the challenges in any business, particularly one with a written score, is how to share best practice.
People will continually find better ways to do things and new things to do. And as long as they are congruent with the promise we make, that’s exactly what we want.
But at the same time this is a kind of entropy – a gradual divergence from the original score for the ‘way we do things round here’ that eventually leads to a completely different piece being played – and an irrelevant score.
Not having a score at all doesn’t resolve this issue – it just makes it invisible. On the other hand, updating the score can end up as one of those jobs nobody has time or inclination to do.
How to overcome this challenge?
I think one answer at least might be regular group practice, where everyone gets together and plays out improvements they want to share – backed up by evidence of improved performance.
A ‘scribe’ takes notes and incorporates agreed improvements into the existing score – perhaps based on a vote, or even as alternative options.
Group practice reminds us that we are custodians of a Promise, collaborating to produce an experience that embodies that Promise for our audience – an experience built on the efforts of those who’ve gone before us, enhanced by those we work with, and most importantly, to be carried on by those who come after.
That sounds like a culture doesn’t it?
Investors and business angels have a clear exit strategy – grow fast for 3-5 years, sell up and crystallise the gains. Happily, this strategy often coincides with that of the entrepreneur, who wants to get this business idea going, and then move on to the next.
Most small business owners don’t have an exit strategy, or certainly don’t start with one.
Thinking about exit often only happens when some event reminds us of our mortality. If that doesn’t happen, the business simply winds down to nothing alongside its owner.
Partly this is due to our natural tendency to think short-term; partly because we simply can’t imagine ourselves without our business, and partly because we don’t believe our business could survive without us.
Perhaps then, rather than focus on our own exit, we could focus instead on the future life of our business as we would focus on the future life of our child – with the aim of making it independent?
If a business was a child, we would nurture it through the early years, then start giving it more responsibility and autonomy, so that when the time is right, the child leaves us, ready, willing and able to make its own dent in the universe.
This doesn’t mean you exit your business with nothing, it just changes who you might sell it to.
Who better than the people who helped you raise it?
I’ve been having a problem with “employee engagement” for a while now. It’s a similar problem to the one I have with “customer experience”.
I’ve been thinking about why this is is, and I’ve realised that its because both these phrases speak from the same perspective. They’re really about ‘me the employer’ or ‘me the seller’. Actually, they are most often used by corporates, so are often really about ‘me the shareholder’.
As a result they feel (to me at least), manipulative, even extractive. They are about what I can get from you the employee, or you the customer.
Employees don’t want to be ‘engaged’, they want the same things you do:
Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how we make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
And the only experience the customer wants is one that gives them at least some of the same things you want:
Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how we make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Perhaps if more businesses thought from this perspective, and tried to give their employees and customers what they really want, we’d have a happier, more productive world.
It’s hard to imagine a more old-fashioned business than shipping goods around the world under sail, yet that’s exactly what’s beginning to flourish right now, thanks to 21st century technology.
The internet, and some clever (open source) platform software connects a global community of producers, consumers and small ports with merchants like New Dawn Traders, enabling sailing ship enthusiasts to voyage ‘for real’, carrying profitable cargo as well as people who’ve bought into the experience; bringing the theatre of a ship coming in to small ports – turning ‘online shopping’ into a community event.
What’s more, these cargos may travel under sail, but the ships use the latest navigational and forecasting technology to stay on course, and avoid being taken by surprise by the weather.
What’s fascinating is what doesn’t get automated. Hauling ropes, for example is done old-school, by hand, by the crew.
“You can get motorised winches, that would do all this at the touch of a button,” Alex Geldenhuys of New Dawn Traders tells me, “but doing it by hand and voice is great exercise, fantastic team-building and very good for morale. Why would you want to get rid of that?”
For this group of people, automation isn’t the end game, it’s the means to a completely new game, that creates space for the very best of what it means to be human – curiosity, connection, community, and care for the planet.
That’s a future I’d like to see more of.