Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Promise of Value

Go Blunt
March 29, 2019

Go Blunt

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I had clothes to wash. I was in Brussels, and the place I was staying had no washing machine, so I headed off for the nearest launderette.

What’s stuck in my mind all these years later is the instructions on the washing machine. On one side of the door they were in French, on the other, Flemish.

The French instructions took up 4 times the space, and talked about “making coins to be introduced into” the machine.

The Flemish on the other hand was blunt – “stick your penny in the slot”.

The point of this story? If you are struggling to explain what your promise is, try blunt.

Exclusivity
March 26, 2019

Exclusivity

Not everyone wants what you could do for them.

Not everyone who wants what you could do for them, wants the way you do it.

Not everyone who is willing to work for or with you wants to do things ‘the way we do them round here’.

Not everyone who could buy into your franchise wants to follow your system.

But for the ones who do, you are the answer to their prayers, and they’ll tell their friends.

They are why you do what you do, the way you do it.

Find them. Help them find you.

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.

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.

Compliance
March 13, 2019

Compliance

The need to satisfy a regulator, or meet legally binding deadlines creates a difficult balancing act for professional service firms.

The regulator’s process is easy to see, so it is much easier to build a business around satisfying their requirements. Effectively the firm becomes not much more than an interface, taking information from a widely disparate set of clients and reshaping it to meet a required format.

One danger is that if every firm looks like this, prospects are going to buy on price.

Another is that once compliance can be automated or outsourced, the firm’s purpose effectively disappears.

Now might be a good time to start re-framing.

Congruence
March 11, 2019

Congruence

It takes effort to be consistent, to make sure that what we do is congruent with what we say; to treat everyone we deal with in the same way; to stick to our principles when nobody is looking, when maybe nobody even cares.

It’s worth it because that’s how we stay in harmony with ourselves, and beause its also how we attract the like minds who will help us make more of an impact.

People like us do things like this.

Thank you.

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.

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.

The spaces in between
February 19, 2019

The spaces in between

No matter how beautiful the fabrics, or how exquisitely they are cut, they don’t become the end product until they’ve been joined together by a unifying framework.

In this case, its one with considerable give in it.