Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee Ownership

Transforming knowledge into know-how
February 27, 2023

Transforming knowledge into know-how

“Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you’ve expressed them.

But you know this isn’t true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them.

And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.” Paul Graham

This is why composing your Customer Experience Score matters, and why it works.

You aren’t simply transferring your ideal Customer Experience onto paper, you’re (re-)defining it. And then sharing it.   And what you create can be further refined and honed – re-designed if necessary if it doesn’t work or when circumstances change.

That thing you currently carry around in your head can become a tool you and all the people you employ can use to make your business 100 times better than it is now.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Make everyone a Boss
February 9, 2023

Make everyone a Boss

Once you’re all working beautifully from the same Score, there’s no real need for one of you to bear all the responsibility for the performance.   That heavy load, shared among many, becomes lighter for everyone.

Especially you.

There’s more than one way to become a Disappearing Boss.  Maybe the best way is simply to blend yourself in?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Now share the work
February 8, 2023

Now share the work

Your second job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to enable your ‘orchestra’ to play your lovely music as well as they possibly can.

To help them surface all their habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones.    To show them how you can all do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better.    To help them make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value.

Your Score is a great tool for helping you to achieve this.  But your team will also need plenty of practice and rehearsal before they will feel confident enough to do it by themselves.

And it’s in performance that you’ll find the flaws in your Score.

Nevertheless, have confidence that it will all come together and it will, sooner than you think.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

“Having the framework of Share Promise, Keep Promise in particular has helped me stay on target and be confident that there is a destination.”

The perfect employee
January 30, 2023

The perfect employee

“Creative action, one might say, is at any level encompassed within a larger system of actions in which it becomes socially meaningful – that is in which it takes on social value.

All creative action is to some degree revolutionary; but to be revolutionary to any significant degree, it must change that larger structure within which it is embedded.

At which point one can no longer imagine one is simply working on objects, but must recognise that one is also working on people.” David Graeber

In other words, the ‘perfect employee’ is made by how you choose to employ them.

Machines
January 20, 2023

Machines

“Prompt: “short, scrawny figure; hunched shoulders; weak, sagging jawline; thin, greasy hair; unkempt, unruly style; dull, lifeless eyes; lack of intelligence, confidence; wrinkled, sallow skin; excessive stubble; crooked, hooked nose; thin, pursed lips; flabby, untoned body; undefined, flabby muscles; exudes weakness, insecurity, unattractiveness; epitome of masculine ugliness; timid, self-doubting; air of nervousness, insecurity; truly a sight to avoid; unimpressive” via Midjourney v4, prompt generated by chatGPT after requesting description of the opposite of a perfect man“. Cameron Butler

“If the necessary reasonable work be of a mechanical kind, I must be helped to it by a machine, not to cheapen my labour, but so that as little time as possible may be spent on it.  It is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.”  William Morris

The Mayfair Set
November 23, 2022

The Mayfair Set

I’ve been watching an old documentary series ‘The Mayfair Set’ on BBC iplayer.

It’s uncanny seeing things that happened during your childhood, and realising what was really going on.

They called it ‘creative destruction’ but it was simply asset stripping.

Of course it’s all happened many times before, and it’s happening again.  Only now we call it private equity.

One thing’s for sure, capitalism it ain’t.

Just ask Adam Smith.

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.

Co-Operation
November 21, 2022

Co-Operation

Last week I attended a workshop on co-operatives. I learned two things that surprised me.

The first was that being a co-operative is separate from the legal structure of the business. You can be a limited company, a partnership, a community interest company etc, and also be a co-operative.

The second was the range of forms that co-operative membership can take. Membership can be restricted to workers or expanded to include customers, volunteers, the community (locally, or according to interest). It’s even possible to set up a co-operative consortium of companies.

The critical components are:

  • Voluntary and open membership

  • Democratic member control (one member one vote)

  • Member economic participation

  • Autonomy and independence.

Not at all suprising then that co-operatives often outperform and outlast traditional businesses.

But the most encouraging thing for me, was the realisation that transitioning a business to a co-operative model could be relatively straightforward – opening up some new and interesting options for exit, while at the same time ensuring a business continues as the founder’s legacy.

Human Feedback 2 – complaints
November 9, 2022

Human Feedback 2 – complaints

It may not feel like it, but when a customer complains about your service, they are demonstrating that they care.

If they feel let down, it’s because they feel they have a human relationship with you.   One they value highly enough to fight for.  What you do in response can make or break that relationship.   So you want be doing it on purpose.

That means it pays to make handling complaints part of your Customer Experience Score.

Obviously you can’t predict exactly what might go wrong for a customer, so this is not about predetermining specific solutions to specific problems.  Instead it’s a higher-level process that can be applied to any situation.

The process starts by acknowledging the person’s emotions as well as the facts.  However unreasonable it may be for the person in front of you to feel what they feel, they still feel it.   And while they are feeling, they can’t be thinking.   What they need first is to be seen or heard as a human being, to have their anger/distress/disappointment recognised as valid responses to being let down.

This doesn’t mean coming out with the bland ‘I’m sorry you feel that way‘ kind of statement – the kind that’s usually followed by a ‘but’ – ‘but we don’t do refunds‘.   I mean genuine sympathy – ‘Gosh yes, I would be hopping mad too!‘, ‘Blimey that must have been sooo frustrating.‘ – the kind of sympathy that enables the complainer to recover enough equanimity to move on.   Once you have achieved that, you can acknowledge the facts of what’s happened, without admitting liability.

The next stage is to find out what will make the complainer happy again.   What will repair, or even strengthen your relationship with them.   You need to be able to offer a solution that is right for both of you.   That means collaboration between you.   That starts by asking them ‘What could we do to make this right for you?‘, then continuing to explore what they would feel is reasonable, without committing to anything at this stage.   Bear in mind knock-on effects of the service failure – perhaps something else was damaged as a result, or they had to take time off work to come and see you.   Also bear in mind what is affordable for you.   It’s worth understanding the lifetime value of a customer, as well as the value of this particular transaction.

By the end of this stage, you have a pretty good idea of what would restore your customer’s faith in the relationship.

Now top it.   Offer a solution that will exceed their expectations, without breaking the bank.   This often involves addressing the collateral damage – for example if a pan breaks in normal use, you’d expect to replace it, if in breaking the contents spoilt a tablecloth, you could offer to replace that too.  If they travelled out of their way by public transport to make a complaint, you could send them home in a cab.   It’s this kind of thing that tips a complainer into an advocate for your business.   Remember, they are complaining because they care.

Finally, deliver on the promise, without hesitation.

This process only works when the people running it fully understand the profit margins and lifetime values for your business.

Make sure they know it, and you can let them be creative in coming up with solutions, no matter what the complaint.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

My weird habit
July 22, 2022

My weird habit

I have a weird habit.

If I’m in a loo where the toilet roll holder is empty, and there are toilet rolls around to refill it.  I refill it.

It doesn’t matter whose loo it is.  A client’s, a friend’s, a department store’s, a pub’s.   I’m sat there anyway, the job needs doing, so I do it.

Imagine, if everyone did this, how much more comfortable office life would be?

A small example of what happens when responsible autonomy is paired with direct and immediate feedback.

Now imagine what your business could be like if you took this approach everywhere.