Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 66 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 25, 2021

As easy as breathing

Breathing is something that comes naturally to us. That doesn’t necessarily mean we do it well.

Nature is lazy, it does enough to get by, to survive. Any more than that is over-engineering and wasteful. So as we grow up, we learn to breathe badly. Not noticeably, but badly enough to create problems for ourselves in later life. Because we assume that since it ‘comes naturally’, we must be good at it. And because we assume that, we assume that the problems are ‘natural’ too.

‘Breath‘ by James Nestor will open your eyes to just how much we’re missing out by taking breathing for granted. Fortunately, it will also open your eyes to how breathing actually works and how it can be improved, through discipline, to create astonishing possibilities.

‘Breath‘isn’t just a fascinating read, it’s a reminder that understanding how something really works, and using that understanding to improve daily practice, pays dividends.

Literally, if the something is your business.

August 24, 2021

Structuring emergence

The problem with a hierarchical management structure, is that it’s expensive – adding layers of overhead and transaction costs that have to be carried by the revenue-generating part of the business. Even worse, it encourages everyone working within it to focus on the wrong thing – their immediate boss. And that makes work miserable for many, especially those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Alternatives to hierarchy, such as holacracy, co-operation and teal address this by delegating much of the management and decision-making to the people at the coal-face – no longer the bottom, but the cutting edge, where the business meets its customers.

This doesn’t reduce overhead that much because in effect, as Dr Julian Birkenshaw of London Business School observes, these structures “replace a vertical bureaucracy with a horizontal one”. Considerable interaction costs remain as people collaborate and generate consent to create emergent actions. But at least the focus is where it matters, on the customer, client or stakeholder.

It seems to me that what’s really needed is both structure and emergence. A structure that takes the thinking out of doing the right thing most of the time, but allows for emergence at the edges to respond to exceptions and to evolve. The main thing is that both the core structure and the processes for emergence are focused on the same thing – the customer, client or stakeholder.

By now, you know all about my core structure:

Even hierachy works better around this. Replace that with holacracy, co-operation, teal or responsible autonomy, and your business will fly.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 23, 2021

Measuring productivity

When economists talk about productivity, they mean profit per employee.

The trouble is that profit is blind. Companies can (and do) generate profit in many ways, not all of which create actual value, many of which destroy value. For example, if I plant a tree in my garden, I create value, but no profit. If I pay you to plant it, profit arises from the same value created. If I pay you to cut it down again, more profit is created, but the original value is destroyed. If you use it to make a piece of furniture, new value is created.

The problem with capitalism is that it depends on the perpetual growth of profit. That means that once the easy sources of profit (feeding, clothing, housing people) have been used up, new sources have to be found.

Often these seem trivial – meal kits for busy families for example – but others are more troubling. Weapons of all kinds; drugs that manage the symptoms of chronic illness, but don’t cure; collagen extracted from executed political prisoners; palm oil from trees grown where rainforest once was. In fact, looked at carefully, almost all our ‘profit’ has come from destroying value somewhere else.

Profit is a very poor proxy for value. We need to find a better measure. Urgently.

August 20, 2021

Pattern Books

One of the things that put good housing within reach of ordinary people was the pattern book.

Instead of designing and building each house from scratch, an architect could design a basic pattern with variations that any local builder could construct. The first owners could even personalise their home by choosing features from a list – a parquet floor here, a bay window there, a different bedroom layout.

The result was our typical suburbs, from Hampstead Garden Village through to Metroland and beyond. Houses that are enough like each other to give a pleasing sense of uniformity and rhythm, but different enough in their details to be lively.

You are the architect of your business. What if, instead of building each customer experience from scratch, you created a pattern book that your team can start from, and clients can adjust to suit their tastes?

August 19, 2021

Customer-centric

Last year, at the start of the pandemic, eight staff at the Anchor House Care Home moved in.

They spent 56 nights on makeshift beds, isolated from their own families, to protect their residents.

The result? Nobody in the home even caught Covid-19.

Anchor House is a small care home, in a lovely old house in Doncaster. The only one owned by it’s parent company Authentic Care Services Ltd. According to the CQC it ‘requires improvement’.

Hmmm.

Perhaps the CQC isn’t designed to measure what really matters.

August 18, 2021

Flow

I had my hair cut yesterday. The salon was quiet. No sound except the background radio and the snip of scissors.

After about 20 minutes one of the hairdressers said “You can tell when we’re enjoying our work, we don’t talk.”

“That’s true,” said mine, “When you really get into it, you just concentrate on what you’re doing, you forget to chat.”

Concentrated silence. That’s what flow sounds like.

How often do you hear it in your workplace?

August 17, 2021

Making a dent

What could be better than making your own me-shaped dent in the universe?

Making a we-shaped one.

August 16, 2021

Chippendale

In the pre-industrial age, the only way to grow your business was through apprenticeships. Teaching aspiring masters everything you knew one-to-one, or one-to-few.

Once they had mastered their craft those apprentices went off and repeated the process in their own workshops. A few might stay with you if you could get enough work to employ them.

The downside for customers was that everyone tended to make the same, tried and tested stuff for the same local customers. If you wanted to make your mark by producing something different, it was impossible to grow fast enough to keep up with demand.

Thomas Chippendale knew what his gentleman customers in London wanted. He knew that there were similar markets in towns and cities across the country. He couldn’t serve those markets himself, but he could enable other cabinetmakers to do so – with a pattern book that could be sold to both cabinetmakers and gentlemen.

The pattern book specifies the end product – what it should look like, dimensions, some key details. Chippendale knew that of course any master cabinetmaker would know how to construct the pieces. He didn’t need to tell them that.

The result is that each piece produced from the pattern book reflects the skills of the cabinetmaker who used the pattern as inspiration, tailored to the sensibilities of their local gentlemen customer.

‘Chippendale’, but not by Chippendale. A halfway house between handcrafted and factory-made.

Not a bad way to scale your unique approach.

August 13, 2021

Philanthropy

It probably feels great to show your love for humanity by giving away your fortune once you’ve made it.

What if you showed your love for humanity in the way you make it in the first place?

Then there’d be no need.

August 12, 2021

Sharing

I’m one of seven children. A lot of work for my mother, who was nominally ‘The Boss’ in our house.

She didn’t like it though.

She resented being the parent who had to get us to do homework, or tidy our rooms, or do the washing up. She resented being the one who shouted and told us off. She resented the fact that her contribution was taken for granted, invisible, unappreciated. Most of all she resented being the one who had to think of everything, for everyone else.

Fortunately for my mum, and as I realised later, for us, she went on strike when she was in her mid 40’s.

From that point on, if we were 16 or over, we took responsibility for ourselves. If we wanted washing done, we did it ourselves. If we wanted clothes ironed, we did it ourselves. If we didn’t like ironing, then we could choose clothes that didn’t need ironing. If we didn’t like tidying our bedrooms, we could live in a mess. If we wanted a different meal from everyone else, we could, as long as we planned and cooked it and washed up ourselves.

It was hard for my mum, because it meant we did quite often live in a mess, but it showed me at least that beyond a certain age, a family, like a small business is a collaborative affair. And that this collaboration works best when its the responsibility that’s shared, not just the work.

Being ‘The Boss’ isn’t as nearly as much fun as people think.

The solution is to make everyone the boss of themselves, within a framework of shared purpose. Everyone is better for it. Especially the business.