Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 35 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 25, 2023

Contribution

As a musical instrument, the triangle is often regarded as a bit of a joke. A bit ridiculous. Not to be taken seriously.

Yet a composer includes it in their orchestration for a reason – because it’s unique sound contributes to the experience they wish to convey. Without it the composer’s promise couldn’t be kept.

When times are hard, it’s tempting to strip back on our offer. To cut down on the details of our customer experience.

Just remember, it’s your promise you’re really stripping back. Eventually it will show.

Use your natural ingenuity to find a better way to keep it instead.

January 24, 2023

What you don’t know can hurt you

Even if you’re sure you’ll disagree, it’s worth reading Marx’s ‘Capital‘. Especially if you’re a small business owner.

As an explanation of how ‘the system’ works, its far more enlightening than anything I was taught at London Business School.

I’m also pretty sure that most of the people who attend the World Economic Forum at Davos have read it, and use that knowledge to their advantage.

Knowing Marx won’t hurt you, The least that will happen is that you have another lens to see things through.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

PS Even better read in conjunction with Professor David Harvey’s ‘Companion to Marx’s Capital‘, or with his open lecture series at The People’s Forum in New York City.

January 23, 2023

Factors of production

From our perspective as a user, the search engine, the AI generator, the social network, the online shop are simply tools. Tools we use to do the things we need to do for work or pleasure.

From the perspective of the tool owners – Alphabet, OpenAi, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon – they are not just tools, they are a factor of production. As we are. We are the factor that creates value.

Why then do we give our labour for free?

Because the factory is hidden from us, of course. That way we can’t withdraw our labour.

January 20, 2023

“Prompt: “short, scrawny figure; hunched shoulders; weak, sagging jawline; thin, greasy hair; unkempt, unruly style; dull, lifeless eyes; lack of intelligence, confidence; wrinkled, sallow skin; excessive stubble; crooked, hooked nose; thin, pursed lips; flabby, untoned body; undefined, flabby muscles; exudes weakness, insecurity, unattractiveness; epitome of masculine ugliness; timid, self-doubting; air of nervousness, insecurity; truly a sight to avoid; unimpressive” via Midjourney v4, prompt generated by chatGPT after requesting description of the opposite of a perfect man“. Cameron Butler

“If the necessary reasonable work be of a mechanical kind, I must be helped to it by a machine, not to cheapen my labour, but so that as little time as possible may be spent on it. It is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.” William Morris

January 19, 2023

Labour

“Nothing should be made by man’s labour which is not worth making; or which must be made by labour degrading … Read More “Labour”

January 18, 2023

Entanglement

Apparently, feeling connected to other people is beneficial to humans.

Perhaps it comes from the fact that at a quantum level everything is entangled. Connection and interdependence is the natural state of things.

Connection makes us healthier and happier. It also makes us powerful.

Doesn’t that feel good?

January 17, 2023

Lifestyle

Lifestyle businesses get a bad rap. As if they are not serious. As if they are not real businesses.

In a ‘lifestyle’ business, people make things, or offer their services, for money, that they then use to buy other things which support and enhance their lifestyle – including keeping the business going.

In a ‘proper’ (i.e. capitalist) business, people put money into ventures that will make them more money, that they then use to put into either the same venture or others, that will make them more money. Sometimes the venture is making things that enhance lifestyles, but it doesn’t really matter what it is (smoking, sugary food, addictive medicines) as long as it turns money into more money. Capitalist business is how we’ve got to the mess we’re in.

But it’s lifestyle businesses that get a bad rap.

When in fact they are the original (and best) business type.

They don’t even have to be small. A lifestyle business can support hundreds of people, maybe even thousands.

The point is that they are about life, not money.

Let’s have more lifestyle businesses, I say.

And let’s make them even easier to run for their owners, so they can get bigger and last longer without turning capitalist.

Ask me how.

January 16, 2023

Reproduction

The reason why voter ID is such a bad idea, is that any physical object capable of serving as a ‘unique identifier’ can by definition be forged. If the technology exists to create it, the technology exists to forge it.

The same is true of a physical product or service. Almost anything about it that you can consider as ‘unique’ can be copied, reverse-engineered or reproduced by someone else.

And will be if you are successful.

The processes around your product are harder to copy, but not impossible. Otherwise franchises wouldn’t exist.

But the values, emotional labour and personality you put into making and keeping the promises around your product or service are uncopiable. Especially if you allow everyone in your team to bring their own self to bear too.

Consistency, not uniformity, is what you’re after.

That’s what makes scaling safe.

Ask me how.

January 13, 2023

Regulation is feedback too

It may not feel like it, but regulation is simply another form of feedback for your business. It just happens to be the kind of feedback you are not allowed to ignore.

Think of it as feedback from your industry. Lessons learned by others that can save you grief. Of course not all of it is designed to help your business, sometimes it’s the result of bigger players flexing their muscle in the market, to make it harder for businesses like yours. Even that is useful feedback – telling you where the bigger players feel vulnerable. Use it to your advantage.

Since you can’t ignore regulatory feedback, it pays to have a really clear Promise, and plenty of the other kinds of feedback coming in regularly, so that you can make sure the requirements of regulation can’t unduly distort your unique way of making and keeping your Promise to the people you serve.

That means that as far as possible, compliance, like admin, needs to be a side effect of doing what you’re here to do, not the other way around.

Of course you need to be compliant, but the regulator shouldn’t come first.

They’re not your customer.

January 12, 2023

Bottom up, inside out

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.

Somewhere back in the 15th century, probably unintentionally, we remade our world, creating a system we now call capitalism.

This system is so good at reproducing itself it now includes everyone and everything on Earth – and even beyond. Whether they like it or not.

We’ve trapped ourselves inside a system that is good for some, very bad for others and terrible for our planet.

It wasn’t always this way. It doesn’t have to stay this way. We can change the system.

But how? Especially when the people at the top are those that benefit most?

Our small businesses are worlds we make and can easily remake.

Why not start there? Build a tiny version of the kind of world you’d like to see: democratic, participatory, responsibly autonomous, humane, non-extractive. Liberating.

Bottom up, inside out.

Until one day, we are the new system.