Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Efficiency

Who do you know that’s suffering from ‘Founder’s Syndrome’?
August 15, 2023

Who do you know that’s suffering from ‘Founder’s Syndrome’?

‘Founder’s syndrome’ – some extracts from the Wikipedia definition:

“The organization is strongly identified with the founder”.

“Obsessive leadership style”.

“Founders tend to make all decisions without a formal process or feedback from others.”

“little meaningful strategic development, limited professional development. little organizational infrastructure in place”

“Higher levels of micromanagement”

“no succession plan.”

“recruits find that they are not able to contribute in an effective and professional way.””

“The founder becomes increasingly paranoid as delegation is required, or business management needs are greater than their training or experience.”

 

To me, much of this looks like the classic, painful transition from one-person-band, to few-person-band, to full-blown company.

Which in the rather smug and contemptuous view of the writers of this Wikipedia entry, is all too often the transition from a small, personal, impact-driven, human-scaled business to a large, impersonal, money-focused capitalist corporation.

The founder wants to keep things personal and true to their original vision.

New owners or new management want to make things efficient, corporate money-oriented, and therefore impersonal.

In other words, as far as the founder is concerned, they want to make it ‘someone else’s business’. (https://gibbsandpartners.com/blog/2021/09/design-your-business-or-it-will-be-designed-for-you/)

Of course the founder resists.

So would I.

 

There is a preventive for ‘Founder’s syndrome’:

 

Become a Disappearing Boss.

 

Embed the founding vision and personality into the operating processes of your business before you try to scale, with a Customer Experience Score .

You’ll be able to scale without managers, without investors – other than the people you serve. Without going corporate.

The best of both worlds: personal, true to the original vision and magnifying your impact.

Even better, once its built into the way your business works, your Score takes on a life of it’s own, nurtured and improved by everyone in the business.

It becomes harder for anyone to interfere – even you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

The Disappearing Boss is currently available as a ‘done for you’ option and a 1:1 coaching programme.

From next month it will also be available as a DIY option as The Disappearing Bosses Club.

I’m looking for 7 founders of unique and amazing impact-focused businesses, employing between 3 and 9 people, who want to magnify their impact without losing what makes them unique, to help me test and refine my design for this part of my business.

It will be a 3 month committment, at a pioneer price, that will add value to your business, or your money back.

DM me if you want to know more.

Where this blog title came from
August 8, 2023

Where this blog title came from

Christmas, 2014.  I was listening to The Reith Lectures on Radio 4.

As usual, I hadn’t taken much notice of who was behind what I was listening to (I didn’t find out who played my favourite ever dance record until 30 years later).  Then the speaker said something that galvanised me.

“Discipline makes Daring possible”.

After that I had to follow up on it.

The lecture was the second of a series on “The Future of Medicine”.  The speaker was Dr Atul Gawande and the episode title was “The Century of the System”.

It “tells the story of how a little-known hospital in Austria managed to develop a complex yet highly effective system for dealing with victims of drowning.” – specifically in freezing water.  A system that could be triggered by the receptionist.

The story came from Gawande’s book, “The Checklist Manifesto“.   I tracked down a copy, bought it and devoured it in one sitting.

I thoroughly recommend it.   Not just because it shows how something as simple as a checklist can save millions of lives, also because it shows how resistant ‘professionals’ are to any kind of systemisation.

Which fed nicely into my fascination with finding that fine balance between systems and humans that makes for consistently rich and evolving customer experiences, as well as consistently rich and evolving employee experiences.

If discipline is what makes daring possible, how little of it can you get away with?

How much daring can it enable?

I don’t know.

But I’m still enjoying finding out.

There’s something about Muri
July 14, 2023

There’s something about Muri

In Lean, ‘wasted effort’ is categorised 3 ways:

  • ‘Muda’ – effort that does not add value for the customer.
  • ‘Mura’ – wasted effort due to variation.
  • ‘Muri’ – wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing people, equipment or systems.

Muda is the most talked about form of waste, sub-categorised into 7 further types:

  • Transport – excess movement of product.
  • Inventory – stocks of goods and raw materials.
  • Motion – excess movement of machines or people.
  • Waiting.
  • Overproduction.
  • Over-processing.
  • Defects.

Mura is often a result of Muda, and the solution to many of these issues is to standardise processes and relocate resources so they are available ‘just in time’ when and where they are needed.

The problem with this of course, is that whether an activity is Muda depends on where you draw the line around the system.  Biomass boilers are eco-efficient, as long as you don’t count the lorries trucking pellets around a country – a clear case of Transport Muda when you look at the bigger system.

What I want to think about today though, is Muri.  Wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing the people, equipment or system.

There’s something about Muri that makes it the Cinderella of Lean.

It isn’t glamourous, fixing it doesn’t attract the kind of kudos Muda does.  Perhaps it’s just harder to measure.

Whatever the reason it gets left to pick up all the dirty work.

Muri is often caused by too much attention to Muda.  Redundancies are stripped out the system, leaving no room for slack.  Everything is expected to run at 100% capacity all of the time.  People are expected to do more with less, both at work and at home.

The result?

Look around you and what I think you’ll see everywhere a massive case of Muri.  People and systems – including our planetary system – stressed and overburdened to breaking point.

As a small business owner, you can’t fix it all.  But you can fix it in your business.

What if you let people work a 4-day week? or a 13-day fortnight? Or take a 2 hour lunch break?

What if you put together a flexible plan of working hours for the year that accounted for busy times and quiet times?

What if you set the example yourself by working only your official hours, having your weekend and taking a couple of weeks off every now and then?

You could do all of this, even in a service business, by paying a little attention to Muda and Muri (but not too much):

Start by writing down your Customer Experience Score , so that everyone can play it consistently.

  • Automate the parts that are drudgery for humans.
  • Leave room for variations that will delight the customer.
  • Then give people the responsibility and autonomy to get on with it, at a sensible level of capacity.

You’ll all work less hard for greater rewards.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Bake the profit in
July 11, 2023

Bake the profit in

I loved this reminder from @Jason Fried this morning, that your main ‘competitor’ is your own profitability.

And that put me in mind of the kind of tragedy I see played out over and over again with amazing small businesses.   Tragedy that could be avoided with the right kind of attention to detail at the beginning.

As Fried says, as long as you are profitable, you are winning.

For me, the best way to be sure you are profitable, is to know that every single thing you sell is profitable in it’s own right, every time you sell it.

And I mean truly profitable, net profitable, after all costs have been accounted for.

Here’s how to work that out:

Let’s say I make beautiful sourdough bread, 20 loaves a day for 20 lucky subscribers who pick up daily.

First there’s the obvious costs of ingredients:

I buy these in different quantities, so I split each quantity into the number of loaves I will get from it:

  • 10kg of heritage wholewheat flour at £27 (including postage) gives me 20 loaves at a cost of £1.35 per loaf
  • 25kg of sea salt  at £20.95 will season 1923 loaves, at a cost of 1p per loaf
  • 10l of water at 14p per litre, will make 20 loaves at 7p per loaf.

I use 100g of sourdough starter for each loaf, made up of 50g rye flour and 50ml water.

  • 25kg of rye flour at £34 (including postage) will start 500 loaves at 6.8p per loaf.
  • A litre of water at 14p will start my 20 loaves at 0.7p per loaf.

So far then, the ingredients for my sourdough loaf cost me 1.35+ 0.01 + 0.068 + 0.077  = £1.51

But I haven’t allocated all my costs yet:

  • Wastewater – for every litre I use baking, I use about 900ml in washing up.  At 90p per litre this means 81p in total, or 4p per loaf.
  • There’s a fixed charge for water and wastewater of 6p and 18p per day respectively, so 24p per day, or 1.2p per loaf.
  • Obviously I cook my loaves, so there will be fuel costs.  I use an electric fan oven, and cook my bread for an hour, so that comes to about 45p per batch of 4 loaves, or 12p per loaf.

That takes us up to 1.51 + 0.04 + 0.012 + 12 = £1.69 per loaf.

And I still haven’t allocated all my costs:

I bake my loaves on trays lined with parchment paper, 2 loaves per tray

  • 10m of parchment paper at £1.45 will do 28 trays, or 56 loaves, so comes to 3p per loaf.
  • My 2 aluminium baking trays cost me  £13.50 each, and will last me at least 5 years. At 200 baking days a year, with 20 loaves per day, that comes to 20,000 loaves, or 0.135p per loaf.
  • The 8 bannetons I prove my bread in cost me £11.39 each and likewise should last me 5 years.  That adds about 0.5p per loaf.
  • I mix my dough in a couple of 12l stainless steel bowls, at £21.99 each.  That adds another 0.22p per loaf.
  • My dough scraper cost £1.20 and should last me 2 years, which adds 0.15p per loaf.
  • I invested in 2 heat-resistant oven gloves with fingers at £13.99 each. That adds another 0.014p per loaf.

These are tiny amounts, but together, add another 4.2p per loaf.

We’re now up to £1.73 per loaf.

And I still have to add costs for maintaining my sourdough starter (feeding it, keeping it somewhere where it can grow); cleaning up (washing up liquid, wipes etc.); wrapping the loaves (paper or paper bags); selling the loaves (point of sale system subscription or commission, website, marketing (even something as simple as an A board costs money, uses chalks and wears out); heating and/or lighting my kitchen; wear and tear on my worksurfaces etc., etc.

Let’s say that adds another 5p per loaf.

And finally my time.  Which I work out by looking at how much I would have to pay someone else to do it – this is pretty much the minimum wage at the moment, so I decide to pay myself the same for now £10.18 per hour. My 20 loaves a day takes a total of 4 hours to make, bake, and wrap. So that’s £2.04 a loaf.

So now we’re up to £3.82 per loaf.

I do this in my own kitchen at the moment, so there’s no rent. But it’s worth pretending that there is rent to pay right from the off. So I look up how much it would cost to hire a dark kitchen. I can find a 170 sq ft one on Bermondsey for £2,600 per month ex VAT. My own kitchen is half that size, so I halve that figure. I only use it for half a day too, so I halve that again, to get a notional rent of £650 per month.

Divided among my 430 loaves a month, that adds £1.51 per loaf.

So my final total cost per loaf is £5.33

Now I need to add a profit to that.

I know I’ve covered all my costs per loaf, so I can experiment with this, to see what my market will bear.

Whether it’s 30p or 70p or £1.70 per loaf, what matters is that I know it’s all profit.

And that profit margin will only increase as I increase production, buy in more bulk, and spread my fixed costs across more loaves – until I have to rent a bigger kitchen, when it would pay to go through this exercise again.

Doing this exercise in such excruciateing detail is undoubtedly a faff.

But it pays off.

Because by the end of it you have a complete and intimate understanding of what it actually costs you to make the thing you make (whether that’s a product or a service), and that means you can charge the right profitable price for it from the very beginning.

If you don’t – and I’ve seen too many small businesses do this – growth turns into tragedy, because all you’re doing is losing money faster.  Chasing sales, when what matters is profit.

Bake profit into each and every item you sell and you can relax, knowing that your profitability gets better as you grow.

That way you can be sure of being around to keep the promises you make to the people you seek to serve for as long as they want you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

What if you could do things the other way around?
July 6, 2023

What if you could do things the other way around?

Clothing brand Unfolded only makes what they have already sold.

More than that, they only make what they know people will buy.  They find out what to make by getting their customers to help with the design process every couple of months.

A very simple way to save waste of all kinds.

Where could you put the cart before the horse in your business?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Flexibility
July 3, 2023

Flexibility

What if something you thought was rigid, needn’t be at all?

One of the many gems I picked up from the latest episode of The New Human Movement podcast, in which Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini interview John Ferriola, former CEO of Nucor, was this.

Since the firm started in the ’60s, they have never laid anyone off.

They have worked short hours. At least once, they have worked almost no hours making ‘quality steel, safely produced‘, which is literally what they are paid for.  When that happened in 2009, they worked in the communities around their plants  instead, because they were having an equally tough time.

So even though people didn’t earn as much pay, they remained employed.   This meant they kept their employment benefits such as health insurance, pension rights, holiday entitlements and length of tenure.

The result is of course, massive loyalty to the firm (which everyone part-owns), and zero resistance to changes that will make it more profitable (also because they get a share of unit and group-wide profits too).

Nucor’s work is seasonal anyway, so they already had this arrangement in place, it just happens to make it easier to adapt to downturns and be ahead of upturns.

Any old how, this reminded me of a ridiculously simple approach to seasonality of work, that seems to be commonplace in Europe, but not here.

In essence, you separate the way work is paid for from when it is delivered.

Here’s how:

Every year, a seasonal business works out how many hours it expects to be producing whatever it produces.

It works out what capacity it needs to have in place for the seasonal rush.

It employs that number of people.

The number of hours worked over the whole year per person is total hours/number of people.

An individual’s monthly salary works out as (total hours/number of people)/12.

Next the business agrees with each person individually how they are going to work those hours to fit with the seasonality of the business.  When they will have holidays, when they don’t need to come in at all, and when they will be working extra-long shifts.

That’s it.

The result is that the business has a predictable salary cost over the year and the right number of people actually working in it at any one time, without having to constantly drop and recruit new people.

The people have a regular monthly income they can use to plan, and space in their annual schedule to do other things – holiday, study, work another job, start a side-hustle in a meaningful way.

Both have room to be flexible if actual circumstances don’t turn out as predicted.

I came across this idea for a factory, but the product doesn’t have to be physical, it could be a service, like hotel stays, design projects, coaching hours, or haircuts.

I wonder why it has never caught on here?

Still, you could give it a try while you’re small and see what it does for you.

All you have to do is imagine that something you thought was rigid could be flexible instead, and make that flexibility work for both sides.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

The cat’s out of the bag
May 3, 2023

The cat’s out of the bag

I see City bosses are clamouring for a return to office working again.

I wonder why?

Are they worried about rents on empty offices?   Those are effectively a sunk cost.

Are they worried about their teams’ jobs or wellbeing?  I doubt it.

Are they worried about ‘losing control’?  Are they bullies then?

Is it about status?  What’s the point of being a boss when there’s nobody around to see it?

Or could it be that when frontliners demonstrate that they can achieve better results without supervision, intervention and commutes, it’s the manager’s job that’s redundant?

Hmmm…

It seems to me that for a long time, traditional corporate management has been about pushing risk and accountability downwards to the people who do the work, without giving them the rewards to match.  Now the cat’s out of the bag.

It’s going to be hard to put it back.

Better then to follow through instead, and give people what they really want:

  • Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
    • Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

Supported of course, just not necessarily in the form of management.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

What do you think?

Unicorns
April 25, 2023

Unicorns

For investors, a unicorn is a business that is capable of becoming a monopoly, a monopsony or something close to either.   Think Google, Amazon, the ‘big four’ supermarkets – the ‘big four’ anything.

Companies like these control so much of the market that they can pretty much set their own prices and guarantee high profits for a long period.

Monopolies, monopsonies and oligopolies are very good for investors and top managers.

They are very bad for free markets, innovation and consumers.

Why then would we want our governments to spend money nurturing them?

I’d rather they spent it nurturing zebras instead.

Thinking together
March 20, 2023

Thinking together

“Think for yourself, but not by yourself.”

My ear caught the phrase on Radio 4 this morning and I was intrigued.  It’s from Julian Baggini’s new book “How to think like a philosopher”  (on my shopping list already, of course).

I don’t know about you, but I am all too often guilty of thinking by myself.   Working things through on my own, running off down blind alleys, diving into rabbit holes, only to end up at a conclusion I could have looked up.

I’d have got there much quicker if I’d talked to other people.

It’s not that other people necessarily know more than I do, it’s that they might, and even if they don’t, going through my thinking out loud, to a group of people with shared values and different perspectives is bound to clarify my workings.

Luckily, when you run your business with a team, you have that like-hearted thinking club ready-made.  Encourage everyone in it to think for themselves, then do your important business thinking together.  You’ll like the results.

Discipline makes Daring possible.