Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Responsible Autonomy

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

Entanglement
January 18, 2023

Entanglement

Apparently, feeling connected to other people is beneficial to humans.

Perhaps it comes from the fact that at a quantum level everything is entangled.  Connection and interdependence is the natural state of things.

Connection makes us healthier and happier.   It also makes us powerful.

Doesn’t that feel good?

Lifestyle
January 17, 2023

Lifestyle

Lifestyle businesses get a bad rap. As if they are not serious. As if they are not real businesses.

In a ‘lifestyle’ business, people make things, or offer their services, for money, that they then use to buy other things which support and enhance their lifestyle – including keeping the business going.

In a ‘proper’ (i.e. capitalist) business, people put money into ventures that will make them more money, that they then use to put into either the same venture or others, that will make them more money. Sometimes the venture is making things that enhance lifestyles, but it doesn’t really matter what it is (smoking, sugary food, addictive medicines) as long as it turns money into more money. Capitalist business is how we’ve got to the mess we’re in.

But it’s lifestyle businesses that get a bad rap.

When in fact they are the original (and best) business type.

They don’t even have to be small. A lifestyle business can support hundreds of people, maybe even thousands.

The point is that they are about life, not money.

Let’s have more lifestyle businesses, I say.

And let’s make them even easier to run for their owners, so they can get bigger and last longer without turning capitalist.

Ask me how.

Reproduction
January 16, 2023

Reproduction

The reason why voter ID is such a bad idea, is that any physical object capable of serving as a ‘unique identifier’ can by definition be forged.  If the technology exists to create it, the technology exists to forge it.

The same is true of a physical product or service.   Almost anything about it that you can consider as ‘unique’ can be copied, reverse-engineered or reproduced by someone else.

And will be if you are successful.

The processes around your product are harder to copy, but not impossible.  Otherwise franchises wouldn’t exist.

But the values, emotional labour and personality you put into making and keeping the promises around your product or service are uncopiable.  Especially if you allow everyone in your team to bring their own self to bear too.

Consistency, not uniformity, is what you’re after.

That’s what makes scaling safe.

Ask me how.

Bottom up, inside out
January 12, 2023

Bottom up, inside out

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.

Somewhere back in the 15th century, probably unintentionally, we remade our world, creating a system we now call capitalism.

This system is so good at reproducing itself  it now includes everyone and everything on Earth – and even beyond. Whether they like it or not.

We’ve trapped ourselves inside a system that is good for some, very bad for others and terrible for our planet.

It wasn’t always this way.   It doesn’t have to stay this way.    We can change the system.

But how?  Especially when the people at the top are those that benefit most?

Our small businesses are worlds we make and can easily remake.

Why not start there?   Build a tiny version of the kind of world you’d like to see:  democratic, participatory, responsibly autonomous, humane, non-extractive.   Liberating.

Bottom up, inside out.

Until one day, we are the new system.

A disappearing act
January 11, 2023

A disappearing act

You don’t have to lose your business to be able to leave it.

You just have to take yourself out of the day-to-day.

To do this, make everyone a boss.   Get the music that’s in your head written down so that other people can play it.  Give your people the responsibility and the autonomy to deliver your business’s unique customer experience consistently, in their own style.

The sooner you do this, the sooner you get to choose how much time you want to spend in your business, the sooner you free the business to grow and the sooner you’ll free your people to grow too.

Best of all, you get to keep everything that makes your business uniquely yours.

In the end, you’ll have built a community, not just a business.  A community centred around the promises you make and keep for the people you serve.  A community that becomes your legacy.

Ask me how.

The irony is that all this makes it an even more attractive buy.

But of course by then you won’t want to sell.

On the shoulders of giants
January 10, 2023

On the shoulders of giants

Jean Hunnisett was a costume designer.   Someone whose job it is not just to recreate ‘the look’ of a particular period, but to recreate it in a way that is comfortable and practical for the actor to perform in.

People have changed over the centuries, becoming fuller and taller.   Clothes have become lighter and less constricting.  Women are no longer used to re-configuring their bodies to suit the current trend by wearing corsets from childhood.   So a costume designer’s job is never to simply reproduce historical examples, it is to re-interpret, re-measure and re-size those historical examples to produce the desired effect on screen without crippling the actor.

That’s hard work.  And Jean Hunnisett did it.   Once it was done, she put it out there for the world to share in her costumes and her books.  For people like me and Vivienne Westwood to find.

No matter how unique our genius, how brilliant our vision, we achieve nothing alone.   We build on the free gifts of human nature left by those who came before and those who work around us now.

That by no means diminishes our achievements.

But it seems only fair to acknowledge the gifts that enable us.

What do you really want?
January 9, 2023

What do you really want?

What do you really want?

I’m willing to bet that it’s something like this:

  • Agency – to make your own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new capabilities and skills.  So you can grow as a human being.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how you make your dent.  To do it your way.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than yourself.  Otherwise it doesn’t feel like much of a dent.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like me’.
  • Status – to know (and for others to know) where you stand in your communities.   That doesn’t by any means have to be at the top.  What you really want is recognition.

 

You can build a successful business by delivering this for your clients through what you give them and the way you do it.

You can build a sustainable business by delivering this for your people through the way that you enable them to deliver to clients on your behalf.

Do both, and you’ve sorted yourself out too.

Fake progress
December 19, 2022

Fake progress

The Mechanical Turk was hailed as a miracle, a step forward in progress, the bleeding edge of innovation.  But at it’s heart was a big, fat exploitative lie.

The same is true of many of our current everyday miracles – free delivery,  just-in-time manufacturing, ultra-cheap food, computers that fit in our hand.

As yet we have not discovered a way to get something from nothing.  Which means that always, someone, somewhere has to do the actual work to make that everyday ‘miracle’ happen.  Wearing out their own car at 50p a parcel.  Sewing designer clothes in a sweatshop somewhere.  Getting paid to vet Facebook posts in a refugee camp – one at a time.  Destroying unusable PPS in a prison, or down a poisonous mine extracting the cobalt for your phone.

Just because they’re hidden away in the bowels of the machine doesn’t mean they’re not there.

They shouldn’t be.   We don’t need these everyday miracles.

We can work much better ones.

Merry Christmas.

See you in the New Year.

Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss and where everyone’s a leader.
December 16, 2022

Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss and where everyone’s a leader.

“In six months, 300 volunteers from 41 countries worked asynchronously to produce a best-selling book. The Carbon Almanac is now in ten languages. The almanac for kids, Generation Carbon is in 17 languages. There are more than 88 podcasts, a photobook, and a daily e-newsletter.”  From Fast Company: “Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss, and everyone’s a leader.“

And dozens more spin-offs too.  The enterprise is still going strong, and still growing.

The Carbon Almanac was created this way.

With no managers, no boss.  Everyone’s a leader.

Maybe that’s also how Stonehenge was built?  And Çatalhöyük or Knossos?

Maybe that’s naturally how we build worthwhile things?

Maybe you could take the load off your own shoulders and reframe your small business into something longer-lasting that way?

Making everyone a boss unleashes amazing energy.  Especially when you also give them a lovely firm but springy floor to bounce off.*

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

*That’s where I can help.