Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 63 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

October 7, 2021

Cheating on your best clients

Turning clients into fans, champions and advocates of your business is brilliant. And not without ongoing cost. If you want to keep them as fans, you have to pay more attention to them than you might think.

For example if your loyal clients have been among the first to buy your ‘one-off, limited edition, short-run, never-to-be-repeated’ thing, don’t give them a free copy in the goody-bag at the next live event they attend. And certainly don’t repeat that mistake at the next one.

As you know, I’m a big fan of consistency, but consistency doesn’t have to mean treating everyone the same. If you have the data – who bought the thing, who’s attending previous events, who’s attending this one, it doesn’t take much effort to find the intersections and tailor your goody-bags accordingly. In fact, giving everyone a named goody-bag only makes things better.

Another example. It’s good to repackage and repurpose content to reach a slightly different segment of your community. Perhaps not so good to sell it to everyone, including those who’ve seen it before. Removing them from your mailout is not hard. Creating an experience that rhymes and reinforces is an even better solution.

Loving your loyal clients back has to be genuine, or the illusion perfectly maintained.

Otherwise, your best fans will feel cheated. And that doesn’t end well for the cheater.

October 6, 2021

A plea for sparrows

Just round the corner from me, a builder has grubbed up around 30 metres of privet hedge that used to surround the plot. It was a lovely hedge, even when it got untidy, but more than that, it was home for dozens of house sparrows.

You might not think that’s a problem, but homebody house sparrows don’t move when their home habitat is destroyed, they just die out.

That’s why house sparrows are now on the red list of conservation concern. London lost 60% of its sparrows over just 10 years from 1994 to 2004. Gardens are still being paved over, hedges and shrubs grubbed up.

Sparrows aren’t exotic, or glamorous, but they’re becoming rare. I for one would hate to lose them.

October 5, 2021

Sharing the work

George Stephenson built his steam engines without drawings. He didn’t need them. As both designer and maker, he could keep everything in his head, using rules of thumb, jigs and tools to speed up the making. Every engine was hand-crafted and unique.

His son, Robert Stephenson, set up the first railway drawing office. He separated production from design so that both activities could be scaled. The drawings communicate the design to the people who build.

When we first set up in business, we behave like George Stephenson. We hand-craft each and every user experience. We learn from each iteration what customers really want.

And when we scale, we expect our team to be able to use the rules of thumb, jigs and tools we created along the way. We assume that they have in their heads what we have in ours. So we get frustrated that they don’t do things ‘the way they should be done.‘

That’s unfair. They don’t know what we know, haven’t learned what we learned, didn’t design the jig, tools and rules of thumb we expect them to use, don’t know to get the most from them.

We forget to give them the equivalent of drawings – our design for a customer experience, on paper, for them to deliver.

The good news is that most of us aren’t generating thousands of designs, but a few. Even better, because we’re dealing with human interactions, a certain amount of sketchiness makes things more effective, not less. The best news is that once our initial designs are out there, everyone in the business can improve on them.

Before you share the work, share the design behind it.

P.S. I thoroughly recommend the book this picture came from.

October 4, 2021

Supply chains

Do you remember the last CAPTCHA you filled in? The one that asked you to click every square that had bicycles in? How long did it take you? A few seconds? A minute?

Of course, you know that every time you do that you’re cleaning data for an AI project, or training an AI machine to get better at bicycle recognition.

To you, that piece of microwork was a distraction. To others it’s a project. A minute’s worth of work for an unknown customer with an unknown purpose, often far less innocuous than bicycles, paid for in cents.

These ‘projects’ are not even tasks, only tiny slices of a task. Like the complex calculations performed by the Lyons Corner House ‘computers’, only without the employment contract, the shared office or the necessary equipment. Without even knowing who or where the ‘computer’ before you is, nor the one after you, because actually you’re spread across continents and time-zones, in refugee camps, prisons and slums.

Now imagine trying to build any kind of working life around ‘projects’ like these.

If you thought bodged-up fire-trap factories in Bangladesh was bad, welcome to the supply chain for the software behind driverless cars, voice-assistants, smart bikes and fitness-trackers. The supply chain of the future. Unless we’re careful.

I recommend this book. It’s not comfortable reading, but I think it is essential.

October 1, 2021

Certainty/Uncertainty

We humans live our whole lives in a Heisenberg gymnasium – dancing between poles of certainty and uncertainty. Craving first one, then having got it, craving the other.

The truth is we can never rest, only find a way of creatively using the tension between those poles to move ourselves, our businesses, humanity and our world forwards.

Tying ourselves to one or the other can only end in tears.

September 30, 2021

Communication, not control

Yesterday evening I watched ‘the very long and very beautiful history of technical drawing’ on the #Railnatter podcast.

Boulton and Watt’s industry disrupting atmospheric engines were the size of a house. They couldn’t be factory built and transported, there was no railway then.

Instead, the firm sent technical drawings to the customer so that local engineers could build the engine on site.

The same technical drawings enabled later, different engineers to maintain, repair, relocate and upgrade these engines. Or, back at Boulton and Watt, to design new, better engines – on paper, cheaply.

Even later, they’ve enabled modern engineers to recreate these engines for our edification and delight.

Technical drawings aren’t even only for techies. They were often used to explain complex ideas and processes to clients, funders and the wider public.

In other words, technical drawings, like musical scores, building plans and other tools we use to collaborate around are about communication, not control. The kind of communication across space and time that allows a business to scale across space and time.

How about your business? What would your technical drawings look like? Do you have them, or are they only in your (or someone else’s) head?

September 29, 2021

What is a musical score?

It’s the music the composer(s) can hear in their head(s) captured in a way that enables other musicians to play it. It allows the composer to delegate the responsibility for producing the music to others across space and time.

You could think of it as ‘management without the managers’. I have thought of it like that.

But I’ve changed my mind. I think that just like building plans, screenplays and a Customer Experience Score, it’s more like ‘leadership without the leaders’.

A musical score doesn’t say “Do this task, then this one, and this one next”. It says “Here’s where we’re going, here’s the notes we have to hit, find your own best way to hit them, together.”

Hmmm.

What do you think?

September 28, 2021

Timesheets

There’s a very interesting article by Alistair Barlow on AccountingWeb today, about timesheets.

Not as a tool for calculating prices, but as a tool for measuring performance.

As I discovered a couple of years ago, ‘time spent’* is a pretty accurate proxy for all costs.

That means that 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. And this can be measured straightforwardly, by simple observation.

Timesheets are one way to observe how much a process is costing to run. But they are a pain to fill in, cost time to complete, and feel intrusive.

Much better to let each process tell you as a side-effect.

I’m working on that.

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

September 27, 2021

Let’s make the world a different place.

‘Better’ is a tweak; a change, a slight adjustment.

‘Better’ focuses on detail and ignores the bigger picture.

‘Better’ says ‘mental health is a problem, let’s sell mental health first aid‘.

‘Better’ says ‘plastic is a problem, let’s make people pay for plastic bags’.

‘Better’ is a tranquiliser ad captioned: “You can’t change her life, but you can change her mood.”

‘Better’ says ‘here’s another app/product/brand to add to the dozens, hundreds even, already in that category’.

‘Better’ says ‘we can keep doing what we’re doing only greener’.

‘Better’ accepts the status quo. Supports it. Allows us to feel good about ourselves, without actually changing anything.

The world doesn’t need us to make it a better place.

It needs us to make it different.

September 24, 2021

Jumping off a cliff

“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.” Reed Hoffman.

What if there was a basic outline of that airplane you could have in your back pocket before you jumped? An outline you could customise on the way down instead of starting from scratch? Not the corporate model you don’t want to be, but something light, flexible, adaptable yet also reliable? That you can flesh out around your Promise of Value as you discover it?

There is, and it looks like this:

Not so much an airplane, as a parachute perhaps.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible