Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible

Repeating ourselves
July 10, 2023

Repeating ourselves

It looks as though humanity (actually only a small part of it) is about to repeat one of our gravest and most frequent mistakes – to start exploiting a vast and almost completely unknown resource without thinking seriously about the possible consequences.   In pursuit of materials that may well prove to be redundant in a few years.

We did it with whale oils, we did it with America’s great plains, we’re still doing it with rainforests and wetlands everywhere, and now we plan to do it with the mid-ocean ridges.

What makes it worse, is that the benefits will accrue to a few, while the harms will accrue to many, for generations to come.   We won’t even recycle the materials we extract – why bother when it’s cheaper to mine, for as long as the true cost is never accounted for?

It’s not quite too late to stop this, Greenpeace has a petition you can sign, but maybe the best thing is simply to make yourself and others aware, so they can sign too.

We humans are ingenious creatures, we don’t have to go on repeating ourselves.

We could force ourselves to think of better alternatives by making promises to our planet and our future selves.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

This is gold
July 7, 2023

This is gold

“There is literally no limit to the promises we can make. The only limit is to the number we are able to fulfill.”* Richard Murphy

So, if you have some energy, capability or capacity going to waste in your enterprise, get making some new promises.

Otherwise, concentrate on fulfilling the promises you’ve already made, and get building your energy, capacity and capabilities.

And if you can’t do that quickly enough, put your prices up temporarily to slow down demand while you build.

 

*The quote is about money of course, which is simply a promise to pay.  A country like the UK, that issues its own currency, can make as many of these promises as it likes, as long as they can be delivered.  It’s what Maynard Keynes meant when he said  “What we can do, we can pay for.”

What if you could do things the other way around?
July 6, 2023

What if you could do things the other way around?

Clothing brand Unfolded only makes what they have already sold.

More than that, they only make what they know people will buy.  They find out what to make by getting their customers to help with the design process every couple of months.

A very simple way to save waste of all kinds.

Where could you put the cart before the horse in your business?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

The future belongs to tadpoles
July 5, 2023

The future belongs to tadpoles

What if people didn’t have to work for a living?   How would you attract people to work in your small business?

Pay would be the obvious first thought, but when people don’t have to worry about survival, money isn’t the motivator we think it is.  Not on its own.

So what would motivate someone to work with you?

Probably, good work, that enriches:

  • The ecosystem of the organization in which the profit is produced
  • The ecosystem of the community of which that organization is a part
  • The greater ecology of the planet

And also enriches:

  • Their inner ecosystem
  • The client’s inner ecosystem

By enabling each person to achieve more of what we all really want:

  • Agency – to make our own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how we make our dent.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than ourselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
    • Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

 

Businesses that do all this don’t look like Amazon, Google or Coca-Cola.   They look more like Nucor, or Michelin, or Haier, or Buurtzorg.

But these are the big players, the mighty toads in the big business pond.

What if you’re just a tadpole?

That’s excellent news, because you can jump into this future right now, as a Disappearing Boss.

You might even make this future happen sooner.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Coming soon, The Disappearing Bosses Club.

Beyond a Survival Economy
July 4, 2023

Beyond a Survival Economy

As you know, I like a book that takes a different perspective, that opens up new possibilities, that offers a different mental model for how the world could be.

“Beyond a Survival Economy” by David Foulkes is one of those books.

I haven’t finished it yet, and I’m not going to save you the job of reading it, because I really think you should, but there was one quote that stuck in my mind as I read it yesterday:

“Payment is always forward oriented…when you are buying something, you are ordering its continued production and sale.” Götz Werner

That is how we as consumers continually re-create the world we currently inhabit.

Which means that one of the ways to create a different kind of world, is to buy it into existence.

To look behind the marketing and decide whether the world this brand is actually creating is what we want for our seventh-generation grandchildren.

And if it isn’t look for something else, or do without.

To put our money where our mouth is.

Not because this will change the world on its own, it won’t.

But we can use it as one way in to changing the system, while we tackle it from another direction elsewhere.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Flexibility
July 3, 2023

Flexibility

What if something you thought was rigid, needn’t be at all?

One of the many gems I picked up from the latest episode of The New Human Movement podcast, in which Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini interview John Ferriola, former CEO of Nucor, was this.

Since the firm started in the ’60s, they have never laid anyone off.

They have worked short hours. At least once, they have worked almost no hours making ‘quality steel, safely produced‘, which is literally what they are paid for.  When that happened in 2009, they worked in the communities around their plants  instead, because they were having an equally tough time.

So even though people didn’t earn as much pay, they remained employed.   This meant they kept their employment benefits such as health insurance, pension rights, holiday entitlements and length of tenure.

The result is of course, massive loyalty to the firm (which everyone part-owns), and zero resistance to changes that will make it more profitable (also because they get a share of unit and group-wide profits too).

Nucor’s work is seasonal anyway, so they already had this arrangement in place, it just happens to make it easier to adapt to downturns and be ahead of upturns.

Any old how, this reminded me of a ridiculously simple approach to seasonality of work, that seems to be commonplace in Europe, but not here.

In essence, you separate the way work is paid for from when it is delivered.

Here’s how:

Every year, a seasonal business works out how many hours it expects to be producing whatever it produces.

It works out what capacity it needs to have in place for the seasonal rush.

It employs that number of people.

The number of hours worked over the whole year per person is total hours/number of people.

An individual’s monthly salary works out as (total hours/number of people)/12.

Next the business agrees with each person individually how they are going to work those hours to fit with the seasonality of the business.  When they will have holidays, when they don’t need to come in at all, and when they will be working extra-long shifts.

That’s it.

The result is that the business has a predictable salary cost over the year and the right number of people actually working in it at any one time, without having to constantly drop and recruit new people.

The people have a regular monthly income they can use to plan, and space in their annual schedule to do other things – holiday, study, work another job, start a side-hustle in a meaningful way.

Both have room to be flexible if actual circumstances don’t turn out as predicted.

I came across this idea for a factory, but the product doesn’t have to be physical, it could be a service, like hotel stays, design projects, coaching hours, or haircuts.

I wonder why it has never caught on here?

Still, you could give it a try while you’re small and see what it does for you.

All you have to do is imagine that something you thought was rigid could be flexible instead, and make that flexibility work for both sides.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Your help please
June 30, 2023

Your help please

When I talk about a Customer Experience Score in these posts, what immediately comes into your mind?

 

  • a number

 

  • a piece of music

 

  • something else : ___________________________

 

Let me know.

Thank you!

Is this wording better?
June 28, 2023

Is this wording better?

Yesterday, I listened to Wendell Pierce talking about jazz with James O’Brien.

He came up with a phrase that struck me:  ‘Freedom within Form’.

And I wondered, is that a better description for what I help small businesses achieve, than ‘Discipline makes Daring possible’?

I know some people have a problem with the word ‘Discipline’.

What do you think?

 

What does ‘Freedom within Form’ mean to you?

 

What does ‘Discipline makes Daring possible’, mean to you?

 

Tell me, I’d love to know.

 

Thank you!

 

Regenerative Uncertainty – creating space for innovation
June 27, 2023

Regenerative Uncertainty – creating space for innovation

I thoroughly recommend following Vaughn Tan on LinkedIn, or subscribing to his newsletter, on innovation and uncertainty.  He works with much larger organisations than I do of course but there is always food for thought for me on how to apply his thinking to my framework.

Today’s tasty dish is generative uncertainty, or how to make uncertainty work for you instead of against you.

A problem for any size of business is balancing consistency with opportunity.

Your clients want to broadly know what’s going to happen over the next days, weeks and months in and around your business.  And so do you.

At the same time, you want to be able to take advantage of any unforeseen opportunities that might crop up and avoid or at least weather any unexpected shocks.

In other words, you want your business to stay the same, even if you want it to be bigger, and you also want it to be able to change at short notice.

Traditional management structures – hierarchy, silos, bureaucratic workflows – help to keep a business the same, by centralising control and slowing down the business’s reactions to events.  Which makes it hard to change.

Complete self-management at the front end enables a business to react rapidly, because control is distributed, but makes it much harder to stay consistent, can lead to wastefulness of shared resources, and at worst leads to entropy.

Vaughn’s solution is to design spaces where innovation is directed, (Clear Guardrails) but within that direction, is free to come up with whatever it likes (Encourage Emergence), and where the ‘parent’ organisation is prepared to put time and money into emergent ideas that look promising without knowing beforehand what that support might look like (Be Ready to Provide Flexible Support).

I think small businesses can provide this kind of space too.   Without having to introduce the usual corporate structures.

Here’s how I do it:

Clear Guardrails:

Your Promise of Value, Unbreakable Promises and Customer Experience Score are yuor Clear Guardrails:

  • Your Promise states what you are here to do and for whom.
  • Your Unbreakable Promises set the boundaries of what you are willing to compromise.
  • The Customer Experience Score provides a floor for how you do it at the moment – the least that should happen.

Encourage Emergence:

  • Every individual playing your Customer Experience Score is free to use their knowledge, experience and judgement to interpret the Score in the best way possible for the client in front of them.   That means every actual Customer Experience can be quite different, yet consistent.  When someone encounters a new situation, they can deal with it.   The Score encourages emergence.

Be Ready to Provide Flexible Support:

  • The value of encouraging emergence comes from recognising when something is an opportunity rather than an exception.   It’s unfair to expect someone to do that on the fly, so your Customer Experience Score includes an ‘Improve Process’ Activity, that runs alongside making and keeping Promises.
  • Improve Process is about regularly gathering and interpreting feedback, both as individuals running your own performances of the Score, and together as a team, to identify opportunites for both playing the existing Score better and creating new Scores to meet new challenges or opportunities.  People can give each other the flexible support they need to take advantage of useful changes.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible

What do you think?

Catching up
June 26, 2023

Catching up

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it really hard to sleep over the last few nights of hot weather, and even harder to think during the day.

So this week, I’m going to be catching up on sleep and on food for thought, so I can better keep my promise to you with more interesting stuff than I have done lately.

I can’t wait.