Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Responsible Autonomy

Sellers beware
April 13, 2023

Sellers beware

When my mother sold her architect-designed corner-plot bungalow, the buyers told her they were aiming to set up their son in it.  They quibbled over everything, nibbled away at the asking price until in the end, she sold for much less than she’d hoped.

Then they knocked it down and built 3 new executive homes on the plot.

There are many reasons why a trade buyer would want your business.

If you care about what happens to it, to your staff and to your clients after you’ve exited, it’s worth knowing what those reasons could be, because buyers are not necessarily going to tell you:

  • They want your client list, but not your staff, offices or name.
  • They want your brand, but not the effort that goes into maintaining it.
  • They want your market share, to add to theirs, so they look good to potential investors or buyers, but not your staff, or your products and services.
  • They want to take you out as a competitor.
  • They want your business as part of a portfolio.
  • They want to run it themselves as a going concern.

Whatever the reason, they’ll usually want you to stay on as a consultant, and the final price will be dependent on performance during the transition.  And all too often that transition destroys value, while you have to watch it happen.

Just as it’s easier to protect the value of your house by making sure it’s in tip-top condition with everything working like clockwork, it’s easier to protect your business’s value if you’ve systemised it.  Even easier if you’ve also documented that system in a Customer Experience Score.

Doing so also opens up other exit opportunities:

  • Pass it on to family, who already know it runs profitably without you.
  • Sell it to your employees, who already know how to run it profitably without you.
  • Sell it to one or more of your fans, who already know that your team can run it profitably without you.
  • Sell it to a like-minded entrepreneur, who wants to see your legacy carry on.
  • License it to any one of the above, on condition that is run the way you’ve designed it to run, in return for a percentage of the profits.

Build your unique promise of value into the way your business works before you sell, that way you’ll get to realise it all and leave a legacy other will recognise as yours.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

The best of both worlds
April 11, 2023

The best of both worlds

Big businesses (or perhaps just their shareholders) crave nothing more than the certainty of increasing profits.   That’s what capitalism means.

To that end, they put a hard boundary around their businesses, turning them into closed systems, where everything is rigidly controlled, organised to maximise profit and nothing else.

The trouble is that a closed system cannot learn.  So when the life around that business changes (as it certainly will) the only way for a closed-system business to deliver the certainty it promises to shareholders is first, to eat itself, generating ‘shareholder value’ by shrivelling it’s own organs, or selling them;  or, worse, to seek to impose control onto its surroundings, turning them as rigid and sterile as itself.

Good businesses, the ones that get to stay big and profitable without financial or geopolitical engineering, are those that put a border around themselves instead.

Borders are permeable.  They allow new ideas in, act as an early warning system for change, create a safe space for experimentation.  They turn a closed system into an open one, yet retain enough control to allow a business to choose which changes they adopt, on purpose.

The best businesses add a twist to this.

They create themselves as an open system for making and keeping promises – not to shareholders, but to their customers. Profits become a side-effect of the system’s purpose. And ironically, become more certain.

They stick to their promise, always learning from their customers and their team what the world outside wants, and re-package their promise to meet that demand, adjusting the way the share and keep it along the way.

Great businesses constantly balance order with openness to get the best of both worlds, a business that can thrive forever, whatever the circumstances.

 

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Cannelloni
April 6, 2023

Cannelloni

In ‘The Uncertainty Mindset’, Vaughn Tan describes an interesting situation:

The assistant chef responsible for the popular lunchtime canelloni dish can’t keep up, and despite following instructions can’t consistently get the finished dish to look as it should, so some are sent back.   This goes on for weeks.

It takes the owner walking past one lunchtime to spot the problem, discuss the problem with the assistant chef, then take the problem off to the experimental kitchen team for fixing.

It makes some sense for an innovative, high-end kitchen, operating at the cutting edge of dining to separate innovation from the everyday.   A busy restaurant needs to run like clockwork, there’s no room during service for experimentation.

But not every problem needs a separate crack team to solve it.   Given a bit of space and time outside normal service (more staff working shorter shifts), the assistant chef and their peers could probably have arrived at the same solution, which was a different method of assembly, that took up less time, less space and produced a more consistent result.   Only if that failed should the problem have perhaps been passed across to the experimental team for a deeper look at the recipe.

Given regular space and time outside normal service, the restaurant team could solve many such problems, eventually including recipe problems, learning from each other as they go until each of them is able to tweak the process almost seamlessly.  That way, the regular team also becomes the crack team.

That’s an idea that’s not just for restaurants.

Rigidity is the wrong tool for dealing with uncertainty
April 5, 2023

Rigidity is the wrong tool for dealing with uncertainty

When  your business is faced with uncertainty, rigidity is the wrong tool to use.   That’s why big corporations fail in the face of change.

The challenge for a purpose-driven, legacy-focused, customer-centred small business is to be open to unknown futures without losing its identity.   To keep their edges fluid and their core firm.

Fortunately, that’s relatively easy to do, because human beings are very good at dealing with uncertainty – especially the uncertainty that comes from dealing with other human beings.

All you need to do is to build the firm core:

First you define a high-level, comprehensive Promise of Value that is specific and distinctive, yet open-ended:

  • Define the people you serve in terms of psychographics, not demographics.
  • Define how you serve them in terms of their deeper needs, not passing wants.
  • Define how you achieve that in terms of values and behaviours, not external measures.

Package that Promise of Value into concrete products and services:

  • Identify the demographic(s) most likely to contain enough people of the right psychographic.
  • Understand what matters to them right now.
  • Identify what dis-ables the motivated.
  • Design a package that addresses what these people need right now.

Use that Promise of Value to drive the design of a Customer Experience Score for sharing and delivering on your Promise that:

  • Embodies your distinctive values and behaviours.
  • Can be played by any competent musician.
  • Enables each musician to bring their own experience and personality to their performance.
  • Allows them to create a new interpretation of your Promise when they encounter the new and unexpected.

Make sure you gather feedback:

  • From the Score as it is being played.
  • From the people you seek to serve and the people who work with you.
  • From your regulator if you have one, and your industry.
  • From the impact you makes on the people and planet around you.

Enable every player in your team to discover the combination of roles that ensures their best performances:

  • Make sure everyone can play the whole Score.
  • Give them regular R&D time, in the company of fellow players, to tweak or re-design the Score, in response to feedback, learning each other’s strengths as they go.

Once you have this in place, you can safely trust your people (and the people to come) to dance with uncertainty.  You can make every one of them a Boss, and leave the future of your business safe in their hands.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

Uncertainty
April 3, 2023

Uncertainty

“Where the future is uncertain, people and organizations have the freedom to influence what it becomes.” Vaughn Tan ‘The Uncertainty Mindset’

Whose idea of the future is your business shaping?

April fool
March 31, 2023

April fool

Tomorrow is April Fool’s day.  A day when we expect to read, hear or see things that have been designed to take us in, to make us think that something false is true.

We know it’s coming on the 1st of April, so we turn on our ‘hoax’ antennae, we take things with a pinch of salt.

But a healthy scepticism is something we need all year round.  More than ever now that AI can synthesise information from everything that’s out there in a convincing format, and an image like that above can be created digitally.

Healthy scepticism, not a blanket disbelief, just the willingness to question what we are told a little more deeply, to seek corroboration from trusted sources and our own experience, our own sense of what is likely.

Here’s a lovely tip I picked up from Elaine Morgan’s “The Descent of Woman“:

Whenever you are presented with some generalisation about what all or some human beings are like, change whatever collective noun is being used – ‘Households‘, ‘Teenagers‘, ‘Single mums‘, ‘Men‘ for a role or individual you are familiar with: ‘Our street‘, ‘My neighbour’s daughter‘, ‘My sister Julie‘, ‘My football team‘.

Then see how likely the generalisation feels.

And another lovely one from Kelly Diels:

“Who gets off the hook if this is true?“

Or the age-old one:

“Who benefits?“

Whatever makes you pause to think before swallowing is good.

Enjoy April Fool’s day.   Even if you do get taken in.   For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought it’s better to be the one who trusts, than the one who sets out to deceive.

‘Tech’
March 30, 2023

‘Tech’

Some people like to push the idea that ‘tech’ will be the answer to all our woes.

And they’re right.

Just remember that ‘tech’ isn’t necessarily their tech.

Breeding deep-rooted perennial wheat and rice is ‘tech’.   Wind-powered ships are ‘tech’.  Permaculture and agro-forestry are ‘tech’.  Line-fishing is ‘tech’.  15-minute cities are ‘tech’.  A circular economy is ‘tech’.   Flint knives are ‘tech’.   Bark-cloth is ‘tech’.   All of these technologies have been used in the past and are being used right now.  We don’t even need to invent them.

But the ‘tech’ that will really save us is our imagination.   If we use it to design ways of being that will work with our planet instead of against it.

We’ve done that before too.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

HT to Dave Foulkes for the prompt.

De-growth
March 28, 2023

De-growth

‘De-growth’ is a word bandied around like some kind of bogeyman, to frighten us into accepting the status quo for a little longer.  As if giving up on fast fashion, disposable vapes and bottled water is the end of civilisation, the dawn of a new dark age.

The irony is that we already spend much of our time in ‘the safe and just space for humanity’.  We just don’t recognise it.

Take a look around at all the things people in your area already do to make life worthwhile for themselves and others: repair shops, special riding schools, non-league football clubs, befriending groups, charity shops, quilt groups, allotment gardeners, art clubs – the list is endless.

What these all have in common is that they are regenerative and distributive, mainly focused on enriching lives through human interaction rather than extracting value.

All we have to do is make those kinds of activities the drivers of our economy instead of profit for profit’s sake.

Then growth can be good again.

Thinking together
March 20, 2023

Thinking together

“Think for yourself, but not by yourself.”

My ear caught the phrase on Radio 4 this morning and I was intrigued.  It’s from Julian Baggini’s new book “How to think like a philosopher”  (on my shopping list already, of course).

I don’t know about you, but I am all too often guilty of thinking by myself.   Working things through on my own, running off down blind alleys, diving into rabbit holes, only to end up at a conclusion I could have looked up.

I’d have got there much quicker if I’d talked to other people.

It’s not that other people necessarily know more than I do, it’s that they might, and even if they don’t, going through my thinking out loud, to a group of people with shared values and different perspectives is bound to clarify my workings.

Luckily, when you run your business with a team, you have that like-hearted thinking club ready-made.  Encourage everyone in it to think for themselves, then do your important business thinking together.  You’ll like the results.

Discipline makes Daring possible.