Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible

An infinite gamer
February 21, 2022

An infinite gamer

I listened to a short tribute to Barry Cryer on Friday.  Of course I found it funny.

It was also clear that he was an extremely generous person.   It seems that what he cared about was keeping good comedy going, and he did that by encouraging it wherever he found it.   He laughed at everyone else’s jokes, called his fellow comedians on their birthdays, and rang them also after every radio show he heard to congratulate them on their performance.  He considered every comedian a fellow comedian, even the younger ones who thought him old hat.  He mentored some of them, laughed with and congratulated others.

All I could think as I was listening to the programme was that if you want to know what it actually looks like to play an  ‘infinite game’, you just need to look at the life of Barry Cryer.  Seriously.

A good question
February 18, 2022

A good question

I can’t remember where I spotted it, but I love this question, clearly inspired by John Rawls:

“How would you design a business if you couldn’t know what position you would hold in it?”.

How would you answer?

Co-creation
February 17, 2022

Co-creation

I heard part of an interesting ‘teach-out’ yesterday.

In the old days, students were ‘members’ of the University – they were part of it, and contributed to its purpose, which was to create public good.   Now they are expected to be merely consumers of the ‘student experience’ it offers them.

The interesting thing is that despite the fees they pay, and the debt they incur to get to university, students don’t want to be passive consumers.  They want to participate.  They want to help co-create the public good.

The same is true of many other people.   Your clients and customers included.   Witness the enthusiasm with which people volunteer to help deliver the Olympics, support the vulnerable in a pandemic, carry out scientific research in their spare time, have their gardens dug up for archaeology.

How can you help them co-create the public good(s) you both desire?

Are there too many managers?
February 16, 2022

Are there too many managers?

That was the question asked on ‘The Agenda with Steve Paikin’ the other day.

Of course it’s the wrong question.

One real question is “How do you build an organisation that takes individual competences and creates an organisational capability”.   In other words, how do you co-ordinate the activities of different people into a consistent,  repeatable business activity?

Another is “How do we create organisations that are as capable of as the people inside them?”.  In other words, how do you make sure that individual capabilities are not stifled/wasted in the process?

If you want your business to achieve its purpose effectively and efficiently, you have to find a way of managing that addresses both of these questions.

Managers are a solution, but they aren’t the only one.  And they may not be the best.

Blame
February 15, 2022

Blame

What should you do when an important piece of data about a customer has been ‘lost’?

You tell them its their fault of course.

You send them a letter threatening them with loss of the service unless they rectify the mistake.

And since you’ve lost the same piece of data for thousands of customers, you make sure there are no extra people to answer the phone number you’ve given them.

I wonder how many customers they’ll lose as a result?

I know I’m cynical, but could ditching clients actually be the point?

It seems a pretty good way to go about it.

Resilience
February 14, 2022

Resilience

When I finally worked out what was going wrong with my website last week I was appalled.

It was a miracle I hadn’t felt the consequences much sooner.  Only the fact that the internet is literally a world-wide web, full of redundancy and alternative routes had kept everything working for so long.

That’s because it’s an ecosystem, and in an ecosystem variation and redundancy is actually what keeps it stable over time.

A machine, in contrast, would have simply stopped long ago.

If something wasn’t quite right in your business, would you want it to carry on working, or would you prefer it to stop immediately?

If you want to make sure it carries on, you might want to build in some redundancy, and some tolerance for variation.

Lost
February 11, 2022

Lost

I’ve been having some technical issues lately.  There’s an error somewhere in the network between my machine and the server that hosts my websites.  It’s probably something trivial – like a misspelled street name on an envelope, but its been tricky to track down.

Having ruled out the obvious culprits, the search began.  And that was the hardest part.   How do I know what to search for when I don’t know what the problem is? I literally hadn’t a clue.  The only option was to try something and look at what came back to guide my next search. After a few searches, a path became clear.

Learning how to market your services feels the same.    How can they find you when they don’t know you exist?   How can you show them you exist when you don’t know what they’re looking for?  Where on earth do you start?

The solution is similar, and takes, not magic, or money, but patience.   Put something out there and see what comes back.  Adjust and repeat until the path becomes clear.

Packaging to serve
February 9, 2022

Packaging to serve

The great thing about your Promise of Value is that defining it can start with you.  Your values, abilities and personality act as a kind of mirror, reflecting the kind of people you can best serve.

At some point though, you have to map what you can offer onto what those people actually want and need.  You have to make it concrete, and describe it in terms that mean something to them, that make it easy for them to buy, rather than for you to sell.

That’s what I call Packaging your Promise, and I’m having to find new words for how to do it, because most common terms are seller-centric – ‘identifying a market’, ‘positioning your product’, ‘channels’ and ‘routes to market’ etc.  That’s a problem, because you’re not selling – in fact you can’t ‘sell’, because as my good friend Barnaby Wynter puts it “Put simply, the buyer has taken control of the buying process”.

What you’re actually trying to do is help the people you serve to buy what’s best for them right now to deliver what’s good for them in the long-term.

And that changes everything.

 

Sleep

Sleep

I’ve finally found a way to lose weight effortlessly – get more sleep.

Sadly for me, this isn’t an answer.  I get a good 8 hours a night.   And even that may not be natural.   In the past, getting those eight hours took longer.  People took two sleeps, with a gap between, where they might read, chat, sew, make love or even get up and do stuff.

Industry made that impossible for most people.  For the past 500 years or so we’ve gradually compressed the opportunity for sleep into a smaller and smaller timeframe. Which is of course counter-productive.  Well-slept people are mare productive, and less dangerous to themselves and others.

For all the emphasis on LEAN and reducing all forms of waste, Muri – wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing people, equipment or systems, is the one we consistently ignore.

One of the best ways to reduce it, is to increase the efficiency of our time at work.   Automate drudgery, make sure people know what they are supposed to be doing and why, give them autonomy over how and where they do it.

The reward for the business is increased profit.  A side-effect is more time for everyone – including you.