Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Keep Promise

Profit. What does it really mean?
May 13, 2019

Profit. What does it really mean?

Our word ‘Profit’ comes from a Latin verb proficere.

It’s meanings include:

  • to advance, make progress

  • to benefit, profit, take advantage

  • to help contribute, be useful

  • to depart, set out

Proficere itself is a combination of two words, ‘pro’ (meaning forwards) and ‘ficere’ which means:

  • to do

  • to make, construct, fashion, frame, build, erect

  • to produce, compose

  • to appoint

Ultimately this can be traced right back to proto-Sanskrit as a word that means ‘do, put, place’ – a word that represents our sense of agency in the world.

Why do we insist on reducing all this richness to mere coin?

Systems and processes
May 9, 2019

Systems and processes

Having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane feels wasteful.

So the company policy is to train staff to do everything in the store, so when its quiet, they can be re-stocking, tidying up or whatever else needs to be done. When it gets busy, people jump back onto their checkouts to quickly get the queue down.

Not a bad policy, provided you have enough people.

But having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane, or casting about for something to do still feels wasteful. So its tempting to the store manager to cut the total number of people. “We have a self-checkout people can use, so unless its really busy, we don’t need any other checkout open, and I can handle that – I can make more profit with a smaller team.”

Now you’ve introduced a bottleneck for customers, a bottleneck some of them are going to dislike so much they will stop shopping with you, despite all the changing stock you put in to encourage return visits, browsing and impluse buys.

Your shop gets less busy, so you cut down further on staffing levels. The queues at the self-checkout get longer, the queue at the manned checkout even longer.

Suddenly you’re hardly ever busy, and company management are wondering whether your store is viable.

3 points:

  1. Checking out is merely one step in the customers’ cyclical process of shopping. Before optimising any step, consider its impact on the process as a whole.

  2. A store is a system designed to enable that process for the people you serve locally. All systems need slack if they are to work efficiently.

  3. A store is part of a larger company system designed to make and keep a particular promise to a particular set of people. Before optimising anything, consider whether it will reinforce that promise or undermine it.

It is of course perfectly OK to put some people off shopping with you – so long as you do it on purpose, and only to the right people.

Potting
May 3, 2019

Potting

It’s very satisfying to try out your idea for a pot, refining with each attempt until you come up with a version you are happy with. But what about reproducing that time after time exactly, in the quantities required to make profit?

To make a living, potters have to choose between two poles – to be an ‘artist’ commanding high prices for one-off pieces, or become a ‘manufacturer’, getting other people to churn out copies of their original by the thousand, competing with even bigger manufacturers to reach a mass market.

Studio potteries are the mid-point many have found.

Small runs of standard wares in standard glazes are produced by the potter and their team, with enough variation in the form and glazes to satisfy maker and purchaser. One-off pieces can behave more like art and give scope for exploration of ideas that keep the pottery style current.

That seems like a sweet spot in which to sit, and it doesn’t have to be small.

User-centric
April 29, 2019

User-centric

The Shakers knew that people wouldn’t be able to resist chair-tilting, so they invented a mechanism that would make it safe for the chair and for the person.

They also made their chairs beautiful.

That’s what I call user-centric design.

Beyond Automation
April 3, 2019

Beyond Automation

It’s hard to imagine a more old-fashioned business than shipping goods around the world under sail, yet that’s exactly what’s beginning to flourish right now, thanks to 21st century technology.

The internet, and some clever (open source) platform software connects a global community of producers, consumers and small ports with merchants like New Dawn Traders, enabling sailing ship enthusiasts to voyage ‘for real’, carrying profitable cargo as well as people who’ve bought into the experience; bringing the theatre of a ship coming in to small ports – turning ‘online shopping’ into a community event.

What’s more, these cargos may travel under sail, but the ships use the latest navigational and forecasting technology to stay on course, and avoid being taken by surprise by the weather.

What’s fascinating is what doesn’t get automated. Hauling ropes, for example is done old-school, by hand, by the crew.

“You can get motorised winches, that would do all this at the touch of a button,” Alex Geldenhuys of New Dawn Traders tells me, “but doing it by hand and voice is great exercise, fantastic team-building and very good for morale. Why would you want to get rid of that?”

For this group of people, automation isn’t the end game, it’s the means to a completely new game, that creates space for the very best of what it means to be human – curiosity, connection, community, and care for the planet.

That’s a future I’d like to see more of.

Virtual Reality
April 1, 2019

Virtual Reality

The right metaphor can get to the heart of your promise faster than a speeding bullet, creating an instant bond between you and the people you want to serve.

Metaphors work because they are simple, direct and emotional.

A good metaphor paints a picture worth a thousand words: “Longcroft Luxury Cat Hotel”.

The best metaphors conjure up an ongoing relationship: “Let us be Houston to your space mission”, “Welcome to our loving family”.

A metaphor that truly captures your promise acts as a compass for everyone involved in the business – your team, your collaborators, your suppliers and your clients. Whatever the situation, people will always know the right way to go.

But you can take it even further, by using your metaphor to actively design the way your business works, creating your own virtual world, where people take on different roles to play out what that metaphor means for your clients. If you get the metaphor right, it won’t even feel like work.

And that means you can make your business autonomous.

If everyone knows their part, has access to all the right props, and has a compass for when things go astray, they don’t need you to watch over them do they?

Rules
March 21, 2019

Rules

It’s often said that Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. That’s true. But what’s the strategy for maintaining Culture?

Here’s mine:

  1. An explicit Promise of Value: principles, behaviours, values, purpose, “the way we do the thing we’re here to do”.
  2. Customer-focused Roles: the parts played in delivering the Promise, “how what we’re doing now relates to our customer”
  3. A floor: the lower bound of what’s acceptable, “the least we should do”.
  4. Process: what has to happen in order to deliver the outcomes that share and keep our Promise, “our score”.

The autonomous enterprise doesn’t need a ruler, but it does need rules.

Control Freaks
March 19, 2019

Control Freaks

Control freaks get a bad rap.

In my experience, business owners become control freaks because they care about the experience their customers are getting.

They want every client to feel as if they were dealing with the owner personally, as they did back in the days when the business was the business owner.

Control freaks want to delegate. They just don’t feel they can.

They don’t know that their people can deliver that customer experience just as well as they can, if not better – even if they don’t do it in quite the same way. They’ve never discovered this, because they’ve never tried to articulate exactly what that customer experience should be. They just do it, and they expect their team to be able to just do it too.

If you want your business to run autonomously, without you, and still deliver on your original promise to customers and clients, then you need to build autonomy into your business.

It rarely happens by osmosis.

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.