Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Efficiency

Off the shelf
February 20, 2023

Off the shelf

When you buy off the shelf, you’re buying from someone who’s producing for people who do what everyone else does, the way everyone else does it.  That’s what ‘mass-market’ means.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy off the shelf.  Just that when you do, you should be clear that whatever you’re buying really does serve what you do, the way that you do it.

Otherwise you’ll end up having to act like everyone else.

A shame when there are other options available.

Recycling
December 9, 2022

Recycling

The reason we pay tolls on estuary crossings like Dartford, Humber and Cardiff, is because until very recently, most freight got shipped along our coasts.  Anyone who could afford a carriage and later a car, could also afford to go the long way round.

There’s no reason we couldn’t transport most of our freight coastally again, except that we tend to assume that progress only takes one route.  That we must ditch everything we ever did before, and use only new things.

That’s not true of course, we can recycle ideas, methods and technologies from the past.

And knowing what we know now, make them work better.

Hoarding
December 6, 2022

Hoarding

Around 2,000 years ago, someone buried their cash. Did it do them any good that way? Almost certainly not. Could … Read More “Hoarding”

How to do big business with a tiny company
November 22, 2022

How to do big business with a tiny company

I loved this post from Jason Fried on company size.   In a nutshell, his company (37Signals) serves about the same number of clients as others in this space, at about a tenth of the workforce.

How can he do that?

Here are some ideas.

First, build a product and service that makes your users so awesome they tell all their friends and colleagues about it.  Then make it easy for them to tell their friends and colleagues.   Do this and you can ditch the marketing department.

Second, let your people manage themselves.   After all, they are able, enthusiastic humans who revel in taking responsibility.  Self-managed doesn’t mean unsupported though.  Like an orchestra, give your players a Score so they know what they are trying to achieve, a Conductor to give immediate feedback on their performance and Rehearsal Time to improve and innovate.   Do this and you can ditch the managers.

Next, get rid of ‘admin’.   Admin is simply about getting the right resources into the right place at the right time.  Build it in to what you do for clients, automate the boring bits that become drudgery for humans and you’ve made it a side effect of doing the job.   Do this and you can ditch the admin department.

Fourth, enable every player in your team to deliver the whole end-to-end service.  In essence make them a one-person instance of your business.   Do this, and every new person you add is a profit centre.

Finally, share the benefit of this new superproductive business with everyone in it.  Reward must follow responsibility.  Ownership must be real.  Do this and you’ve created a sustainable legacy to be proud of.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Dividends
November 8, 2022

Dividends

My interest in documenting how things should work came from my years in software development.   To me, it always seemed sensible to work out what you wanted your software to do before you built it, or bought it.

And even more sensible that it should reflect the way you do business rather than an average of hundreds of other firms.

Writing a customer Experience Score before you commission software has other benefits too.

It gets everyone thinking about change – ‘how we really want it to work’ rather than simply ‘how we do it now’.

It gets everyone thinking a level up from the day-to-day, about what has to happen when rather than how it happens.

But most of all it gives everyone, including you, the chance to reframe your business from a management hierarchy to an easily replicable system for making and keeping promises.

And the benefits keep coming after you’re done.   Once you can demonstrate that your unique system for making and keeping promises works consistently, people will ask you to do more of it for them.  And you will find it easy to scale up on delivery.

Like many a human enterprise, the hard work is all up front, but worth it for the dividends flying in later, almost effortlessly.

And isn’t that just what it means to be an entrepreneur?

Conservation
August 19, 2022

Conservation

When there’s a heatwave on, the best thing for me to do is to sit still and read.  Or colour in.

The reason I have such a big library is that I can’t help following threads from one book to another. Sometimes I keep on picking up new threads, often I go back on myself and revisit old favourites.

Eventually they all get darned in together, to make something new and familiar, well-worn and stronger, decorated by repairs.

Like a Pearly King’s suit, or my lovely old linen sheet, too fine and lovely to throw away, so kept just for heatwaves.

What it costs you to do
August 2, 2022

What it costs you to do

An entire industry has grown out of working out what it costs a business to do the things it does.   Along with a panoply of tools and techniques.  When I was studying at London Business School, I loved it.

It turns out that there is a simple measure that’s good enough for most cases.

Time.  Or more accurately, duration.

If you know how many clients you deal with, how long it takes for each client to go through your Share and Keep Promise process, and what your total operating costs are over that time period, then you know what it costs you to do what you do for each client you serve.

If you don’t like the answer you can drill down into Share Promise or Keep Promise to find out where things could work better.  And so on.

So how do you measure duration?

By logging events that are of interest and adding up the time that’s elapsed between them.

I’m sure you already note these events: when a prospect makes an enquiry; when a prospect becomes a client; when you welcome a client onboard, when the particular promise you made to this client has been kept.

You may even collect them automatically – they’re in your CRM, or your accounting system, they might even be in your workflow management system.  String them together for each client and you’ve got some extremely useful data.   Combine this with some other equally simple metrics and you’ve got the kind of process feedback you can use to grow your business efficienty and sustainably if that’s what you want.

A little bit of Discipline makes a lot of Daring possible.

How does improvement happen?
July 21, 2022

How does improvement happen?

How does improvement happen?

First by collecting feedback, both quantitative and qualitative.

Then by looking at what that feedback might be telling you about what’s happened in the past, and what is likely to happen in the future if nothing changes.

Then by adjusting the system accordingly.

Your adjustments might be wrong of course, which is why it’s a good idea to keep them small until feedback shows you’re heading in the right direction.

Over time you’ll learn to keep it simple.

Then improvement will come naturally.

Instinct and intention
July 11, 2022

Instinct and intention

In the late 18th century it was tough to be a sailor in the Royal Navy.   Discipline was harsh, pay was low, the food was terrible and battles were deadly.   Especially if you were part of a gun crew.

Firing a cannon was far from simple, it took several steps and required good co-ordination and careful timing.   The equivalent of a modern Formula1 pitstop.   Plus of course all the time you were firing, the enemy was firing at you, shattering the hull of your own ship into lethal splinters.

The bosses expected gun crews to work by instinct.  Their thinking was that in the midst of battle, when your life depended on it you would naturally do the best job you could.

A new boss changed all that.   His radical idea was to look at what the best gun crews did, then train every crew to work as they did, practicing until every crew performed the best it could – consistently and on purpose.

“A waste of good ammunition” said his bosses.

Horatio Nelson insisted and got his way.

The rest as they say, is history.

Instinct can get you a long way, but if you want to go further, you need intention.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

The scientific method
April 27, 2022

The scientific method

We constantly observe the world around us.    We form certain assumptions about how it works and why it works that way.

But we rarely take things further and actually test those assumptions with an experiment.   If we did, we’d find out that they are often incorrect.  Which might lead us to draw new conclusions and most importantly take different actions as a result.

“The scientific method” isn’t just for science.   It’s a great way to approach building your business ‘on purpose’.

Using it to understand your customers better is a profitable place to start.