Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 67 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 11, 2021

What’s wrong with being a boss?

A boss is someone who tells you what to do. Often they also tell you how to do it. A boss’s job is to get more work out of you than they are paying you for.

On the whole, we don’t like how it feels to be on the receiving end of either of these things, which is why we leave big corporates to become ‘our own boss’.

But when we have to work with other people, we have to become ‘the boss’. And it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up as leadership, the job is the same – getting more work out of others than we’re paying them for, telling them what to do and how. It’s uncomfortable. It feels wrong. Especially when we’re a small team that feels more like family. You don’t do these things to family.

It’s also frustrating, because your team know what a boss is, and what a boss does. and they don’t like it any more than you did.

Turning yourself into the thing you hoped to leave behind is not inevitable. If you build a system that enables every person in your enterprise to lead, and rewards them accordingly, you avoid the discomfort and frustration of being a boss. Ironically, it enables everyone to get more work done too. So if you’re focused on impact rather than profit, this is the way forward.

When everyone’s a leader, the boss can happily disappear.

August 10, 2021

Stereotypes

The other day I had an experience I’d not had for 40 years – of being followed around a shop by a security guard, convinced I’m trying to steal something.

I wasn’t shoplifting, but clearly I looked like I might be a shoplifter because of what I was wearing. 40 years ago punk/goth, the other day an anarchist face mask.

It amused me, because real shoplifters aren’t trying to stand out. They look like everyone else. That’s how they get away with it.

But we love our stereotypes, and can’t resist them.

We really should beware of them.

August 9, 2021

Less is more

Have you ever stood in front of sweet counter full of chocolate bars? Or a wall-full of 500 pizza choices. And walked away empty-handed after a few minutes, because you couldn’t decide which to choose?

As Sheena Iyengar and her co-researchers discovered, too many choices actually makes it harder to choose something over nothing.

In a well-known experiment in a store that was famous for the extensiveness of its range, they set up a tasting station for jam. Every half an hour the choices available to taste switched from 6 jars, to 24 and back again.

More people looked and tasted when there were 24 jams to choose from. But 6 times as many people bought when there were only 4.

The lesson for packaging your Promise?

If you want people to notice you, have lots of choice. If you want them to buy, don’t make them work so hard. They’ll probably give up.

August 6, 2021

500 percent

I realise I forgot to mention the book pictured in my earlier blog this week.

It’s well worth a read, sadly only available on Amazon.

Here’s my takeaway from reading it:

Sustainable improvement only came when the owners, Julian and Andrew did three things:

They re-framed what a business is about: “A business exists to form contracts, and satisfy them successfully.” In other words, it’s about making promises and keeping them.
They re-designed the highest level business processes around that definition to create a framework. In other words, they created a score for people to follow, without telling them where to put their fingers.
They handed over all the work that takes place within that framework to each and every person in the business, along with the lion’s share of the rewards. Each person became in effect a virtual business running the entire end-to-end process of forming contracts and satisfying them successfully, and collaborating with peers to do so. In other words, they enabled people to fulfill all their human needs for purpose, mastery, agency, autonomy and community, not just their basic need to ‘make a living’.

As a result, the business became not just self-managing, but self-leading. In other words, they built a scalable, replicable system for making and keeping promises, that didn’t need them to be there.

If a manufacturing business can do this, then so can you.

And I’d love to help.

August 5, 2021

Handovers

When you grow a business by adding functions – accounts, sales, customer service, warehousing, delivery – you inevitably add overhead. Because every new function you add introduces the need for handovers, often several of them. Running the business becomes a matter of co-ordinating handovers and catching the things that fall between functions, rather than making and keeping promises to customers.

All of this costs money. You’ve introduced transaction costs. At the extreme, the thing the business is supposedly here to do is the thing that suffers – because it’s the only part that can give. So you get turkey twizzlers for school dinners at a higher cost than if a local dinner lady cooked from scratch every day.

The answer is to pick a unit of growth that’s focused on the customer, and replicate it. That unit is the process of making and keeping a promise to them.

Let one Role run the entire process of making and keeping a promise to a customer from beginning to end, with no handovers, no transaction costs, no overhead, and you’ve got a recipe for efficient scalability, that works within the firm and beyond. It’s also more fun for the people running the process.

More efficiency, more impact, more fun. What’s not to like?

August 4, 2021

Sunflower moments

“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time.

His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

The vision on the canvas is a third thing, utterly intangible and inexplicable, the offspring of the sunflower itself and van Gogh himself.” D.H. Lawrence.

That ‘third thing’, the ‘vivid relation’ between ‘me’ and the other, is a moment when we feel truly alive, connected, aware of our place in the universe. Such moments don’t only happen to artists. I’ve experienced them while shopping, walking or making dinner. The difference is I’ve never tried to capture them.

It seems to me that much of what we do as humans is about creating opportunities where those ‘sunflower moments’ – that you might also call Sawubona can happen.

What if that is what work was really for?

What if we measured our performance by that?

August 3, 2021

Resisting Commodification

What do we mean when we call something ‘a commodity’?

It means its substitutable, interchangeable, you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

It means we don’t have to think about it. It’s just there. To hand when we need it, otherwise invisible.

I no longer use ‘commodity olive oil’. Mine comes from Marije in Portugal. I’ve seen her family harvesting the olives. I’ve seen the designs for the special ceramic bottles it can come in. I’ve seen the ship ‘Gallant’ sailing to pick her oil up, and sailing back to Penzance to drop it off. I know the names of many of the people involved in making that happen.

And every time I use my oil, which is every day, I think of them and all the work that’s gone into getting olive oil to my table. I feel connected to a network.

My olive oil is not a commodity, I pay well above average price for it, and it’s worth every penny.

Commodification is not inevitable. We can choose to be different, as buyers, producers and middle-men.

As a community.

August 2, 2021

The devil is in the detail

Except when it isn’t.

Often, the devil is in the big picture. The model you’re working to. Unquestioningly, perhaps even unconsciously.

That’s what Julian and Andrew realised at Matt Black Systems. After a decade of attempts to turn around their business, with LEAN consultants, re-organisations, and efficiency drives, none of which worked, the devil wasn’t in the fine detail of processes, nor was it in the employees. It was in the model the business was built on – top-down, hierarchical, siloed into specialisms, command and control.

Alternative models aren’t necessarily easy, but they give you the opportunity to choose your problems:

“The organisational design you adopt will determine the set of problems you have to live with. Often the design is considered a ‘given’ its problems unavoidable. We chose to change our model because the problems we had were threatening our business. We wanted a better set of problems.”

Once Andrew and Julian had realised this, it took just 18 months to transform their business to the point where productivity had increased by 500%; customers were delighted, and staff found their work rewarding personally and financially, without killing themselves in the process.

Julian and Andrew could leave the building, never to return.

Of course, business-threatening problems are a great spur to radical change. But you don’t have to wait till then.

You could pick your problems early, and walk out of your business when you choose.

July 30, 2021

Pruning for productivity

When you grow a tree for a productive canopy (of shade, or fruit, or flowers, or air-cleaning properties), just letting it grow straight up is rarely the most effective approach.

Instead you let the main stem (the leader) grow up nice and strong until you’ve got the height you want.

Then you take it out, to encourage as many side shoots as you can, because that’s where production happens. From then on, every would-be leader is ruthlessly pruned out.

Every tree needs a strong leader at the beginning of its growth.

Once it’s the right shape though, its better to redirect that energy to where it’s really needed – the productive boundary.

July 29, 2021

Bananas

Today, I saw yet another advert for alcohol made from waste food. This time, rum distilled from banana skins.

Maybe it’s me, but I can’t help thinking there are better uses for food waste – even inedible banana skins. For example, they could be turned into energy through anaerobic digestion, or composted to regenerate depleted soils.

In other words they could contribute to solving urgent, existential problems for humankind.

I’m all for enriching life. But last time I looked there were a dozen or so rums available in Sainsburys, and only one home for humans.

As humans, we have amazing resources for making change.

Let’s not waste them on gimmicks.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible