Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee Ownership

Exit
April 5, 2019

Exit

Investors and business angels have a clear exit strategy – grow fast for 3-5 years, sell up and crystallise the gains. Happily, this strategy often coincides with that of the entrepreneur, who wants to get this business idea going, and then move on to the next.

Most small business owners don’t have an exit strategy, or certainly don’t start with one.

Thinking about exit often only happens when some event reminds us of our mortality. If that doesn’t happen, the business simply winds down to nothing alongside its owner.

Partly this is due to our natural tendency to think short-term; partly because we simply can’t imagine ourselves without our business, and partly because we don’t believe our business could survive without us.

Perhaps then, rather than focus on our own exit, we could focus instead on the future life of our business as we would focus on the future life of our child – with the aim of making it independent?

If a business was a child, we would nurture it through the early years, then start giving it more responsibility and autonomy, so that when the time is right, the child leaves us, ready, willing and able to make its own dent in the universe.

This doesn’t mean you exit your business with nothing, it just changes who you might sell it to.

Who better than the people who helped you raise it?

Overhead
March 25, 2019

Overhead

When you add a manager to a business, you add overhead. So the first effect of hiring someone to replace yourself as manager or supervisor – so you can work on your business instead of in it – is to take a real hit in profitability.

What if, instead of appointing someone new to manage your people, you appointed them to manage themselves? You could use the saving in overhead to invest in them instead, building a supporting framework, coaching, mentoring, training, and of course a fair share of the rewards.

When you want to expand to serve more customers or clients, you can simply add more people.

Those who’ve taken this approach have found the return on this kind of investment to be well worth it.

Company
March 15, 2019

Company

“An autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise.”

Sounds like a pretty good place to work.

When you make a company, you make a utopia.
March 8, 2019

When you make a company, you make a utopia.

“When you make a company, you make a utopia. Its where you design your perfect world.” Derek Sivers.

As Derek Sivers pointed out – building a business is a creative act, and like imagining a building, or hearing a symphony in your head, or visualising a ballet, you can make it behave however you want it to.  

You make the rules.  

You don’t have to do what everyone else does. You don’t have to do what most people expect. You don’t have to do the same-old, same-old. You don’t even have to get big.

You can build a business that creates value in a way that matters to you an the people you serve.   That gives people the physical, mental and spiritual nourishment they need; that husbands resources; that grows everyone it touches; that empowers everyone to lead.  That enables everyone to be fully human.

For millennia people have used new and innovative technologies to do this.  And sometimes, like New Dawn Traders they re-discover ancient ways of doing it too.

What does your perfect world look like?

You can build it if you dare.

Self-Orchestration
February 27, 2019

Self-Orchestration

Orpheus is an orchestra without a conductor.

That doesn’t mean they are directionless, they have a score that tells them what to play.

That doesn’t mean they are mechanical, a core group guides the interpretation for every piece they play, and that core group changes every time.

That doesn’t mean they are homogenous, many players dip in and out, although a minimum number of experienced players ensure the Orpheus promise is kept for every performance.

Being conductorless doesn’t mean they are leaderless, it means everyone has to step up and take their turn at leading.

There’s always another way of succeeding. It just needs to be thought through.

Orpheus (the orchestra) has been doing this for more than 40 years.

Exceptions
February 22, 2019

Exceptions

Exceptions are where it pays to treat everyone the same. By which of course I don’t mean “computer says no”.

Much better to have a ‘golden rule’ to fall back on that enables anyone on your team to deal with the unexpected in a way that shows you absolutely stand by the promise that you make – even if the exception in question isn’t actually a customer.

Standardisation enables brilliant exception-handling, because it takes care of the routine and so frees people up to be human.

Handling exceptions brilliantly, as a human being, creates fans.

Consequences
February 7, 2019

Consequences

One of the beauties of having a score is that there are no excuses for not playing it.

Playing it and discovering that a particular combination of notes is impossible to produce is fine – as long as you tell the composer. Refusing to play a section because you think it will be too hard, or because you ‘don’t like the look of it’ is not.

A musician wouldn’t expect to be paid, or to stay in an orchestra for long if they persisted in behaving like this.

Why should anyone else?

Of course this works both ways. Every musician that contributes to produce an experience audiences pay for, should share in the profits as well as the applause.

Who’d ‘a thought it?
January 29, 2019

Who’d ‘a thought it?

“Labor can and will become its own employer through co-operative association.” — Leland Stanford.

Yes, that Stanford.

I learn something new every day.

Ownership
January 25, 2019

Ownership

“How do I get my people to think like an owner?”

Make them an owner.