If you’re interested in what makes small businesses successful, it’s well worth a read.
Ignore the points made at the end – that’s just wishful thinking on the part of management consultants. These companies don’t need outside interference, or to look more like their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. They’ve been working well this way for decades and are likely to continue.
For me, it’s an encouraging article, that shows that given the right environment it is possible to be a global business and operate humanely at home and abroad.
Why try to be a unicorn when you can be a zebra?
I’d like to think there are many such businesses hidden away here in the UK too. I’m unlikely to find out of course, because if there are, they won’t be looking at social media.
Since, as usual at this time of year, there’s been nothing on TV, we’ve been catching up on ‘Connections’ with James Burke. A fascinating ‘alternative view of change’ first broadcast in 1978.
What the series shows is that change (or as some like to call it ‘progess’) is not linear at all.
Discoveries are sometimes made on purpose, but almost as often they are made by accident, as a side effect of looking for something else, or as a failed experiment, or by someone coming at it from a different perspective. Often they were ignored completely, until enough of them were in place for others to put them together and create something new.
And as we know from the history of steam power, gunpowder and moveable type printing, if the social conditions weren’t conducive, they were often simply abandoned or used for pure amusement for centuries.
Serendipity, obliquity and culture play such an important part, that it’s almost impossible to predict where future change will come from.
What we can do is keep ourselves aware of the bigger systems, cultural and scientific, which are the drivers and sources of change – ecology, physics, capitalism, politics, the carbon cycle. That way, we can at least have an idea of where the impacts of change might be felt, and decide if we want it or not.
That means learning about how our world works. It takes effort, and often a bit of digging to find the material – which in itself tells us something about the system we currently live in.
‘Connections’ is the kind of reality tv we used to make. The kind I’d like to see more of.
Back in February, I got involved in a project called ‘Connect the Dots’, an ancillary to The Carbon Almanac.
The idea was to take the well-researched facts, issues and solutions from the Almanac and connect them together visually, so that someone can see how they interact. More importantly, so someone can see how a single action can have multiple impacts.
We started with Solutions, because in spite of what we see and hear, they are already out there. People are already taking practical, unheroic, collective steps to change the systems that we have turned into traps.
We’re having a rest for a week, and then we’ll come back to it, perhaps with more people joining in. So it will continue to grow.
All designed to get us talking to each other about climate change. Because when we talk, we connect, and when we connect we can take action big enough to make a difference.
After all it’s our future we’re talking about.
It’s not too late, but we need to start changing our systems now.
In the late 18th century it was tough to be a sailor in the Royal Navy. Discipline was harsh, pay was low, the food was terrible and battles were deadly. Especially if you were part of a gun crew.
Firing a cannon was far from simple, it took several steps and required good co-ordination and careful timing. The equivalent of a modern Formula1 pitstop. Plus of course all the time you were firing, the enemy was firing at you, shattering the hull of your own ship into lethal splinters.
The bosses expected gun crews to work by instinct. Their thinking was that in the midst of battle, when your life depended on it you would naturally do the best job you could.
A new boss changed all that. His radical idea was to look at what the best gun crews did, then train every crew to work as they did, practicing until every crew performed the best it could – consistently and on purpose.
“A waste of good ammunition” said his bosses.
Horatio Nelson insisted and got his way.
The rest as they say, is history.
Instinct can get you a long way, but if you want to go further, you need intention.
Patrick Hurley takes a huge blank piece of paper, thinks about what he wants to draw – ‘It’s going to be a ring, I want it to have depth, it will be made of squares‘ – marks a few points for guidance.
Then he draws. In a single continuous line.
From a distance the result has impact. There’s a clear structure, a vision – you might almost say a purpose to it.
Up close, you feel tenderness for the humanity of it. The wobbles, the inconsistencies, the variation, the failure to keep to the ‘perfect’ alignment.
‘It’s like life,‘ says Patrick ‘You can only go forward, if you make a mistake, do better next time, or do something that atones for it.’
Yes.
Work is part of life. So why not approach it this way too? Create a framework with clear boundaries, a goal and a method for achieving it. Then let everyone add their own humanity.
Impact with tenderness.
Find Patrick and more of his work on instagram: @hurleyman03.
When everyone feels divided, when it seems that group is set against against group, right against right, and politicians openly sow discord, I find it helps to remember that we have a lot of things in common.
The biggest of which is our place in the ecology of the planet we share. A place we are jeopardising by our own short-sighted actions.
Its not too late to reverse that jeopardy. If we recognise that despite all our differences, we have this vulnerability in common, we’ll find we also have the power to reverse it.
Everything you do in your business is done in service of making and keeping Promises to the people you serve.
This is the bigger picture:
You need to remember that when you compose your Score, and you need to ensure that your people will remember it every time they play it.
Principle 2: Not how it is now, but how you really want it to be.
As soon as you’ve written it down, your Score becomes your new ‘As-is’. Until you improve it again. You’ll never get to ‘To-be’.
Principle 3: The person playing this will be a human being like you.
You’re not composing for a robot, or a computer. You’re composing for a human, who can fill in any gaps from their experience, knowledge and skill. They need prompts, not instructions. They’ll probably suggest improvements.
Principle 4: Have a golden rule for dealing with the unexpected, and a recovery process for when things go wrong
You can’t predict every eventuality. Things change. So it pays to have a ‘golden rule’ that allows anyone to deal with them in line with your Promise.
Similarly, mistakes are bound to happen. The way you deal with them is part of your Promise. And there is a way to make errors work for you and actually strengthen your Promise: Be human.
Principle 5: Admin is a side-effect of doing the job
You want to spend as much time as possible on the thing that pays – making and keeping Promises to the people you serve. Everything else is a side-effect. But you have to design your business to work that way.
The first piece of admin to treat like this, is getting paid. Make it part of the process – even if it’s the final note of your Score. That way you can make sure it happens, on time, every time. Especially if you also make it part of the customer experience.
